John Coleman’s hourlong news special “Global Warming – The Other Side” now online, all five parts here

I’ve watched part 4, which had an early release. The video is cheering, and supported with a multitude of graphics and interviews. “Chiefio” aka E.M. Smith and Joe D’Aleo make strong appearances.

John Coleman interviews E.M. Smith in part 4

Here is the KUSI introduction:

A computer programmer named E. Michael Smith and a Certified Consulting Meteorologist named Joseph D’Aleo join the program to tell us about their breakthrough investigation into the manipulations of data at the NASA Goddard Science and Space Institute at Columbia University in New York and the NOAA National Climate Data Center in Ashville, North Carolina.

E. Michael Smith kept a blog of his findings. See his site by clicking here.

Joe D’Aleo has written a detailed report on the findings. It is available here .

I have written a blog about this important climate news development. It is available by clicking here.

D’Aleo wrote an outstanding article on Climategate. It is available here.

You can read about the English Climategate leaked or hacked files at the Anglia University Climate Center at this newspaper site.

And, there is a US connection with the original Climategate, as well. Professor Michael Mann, of Penn State University, is in the middle of it. Here is the latest on it.

All five parts of the video are now online.

Click below to watch each segment of the KUSI Special Report, Global Warming: The Other Side

The evil fools don’t care about science or about debating. They have an end goal and they don’t care how they get there. Your life, my life or millions of other lives, they will spin their lies regardless of the outcome. The laugh will be on them at the end. As Margaret Thatcher said, “Eventually, they will run out of other people’s money.”

Actually, Mr. Coleman is very restrained on his treatment of the US Government types involved here – he left out James ‘I see Venus Everywhere’ Hansen and Gavin ‘the Hitman’ Schmidt’s roles in all this. While Gore, Strong, and Mann certainly deserve disdain, they are far from being the only ones. . .then again, he did only have an hour of air time.

It’s still amazing to me that anyone would believe that people can change weather. How did we get to this idiotic, illogical point? Imagine how bad it would be if the man-made warming wasn’t masking the cold.

The show had a nice mix of serious and light material. Near the end, The “Hide the Decline” song and animation made a nice counter weight to the serious charges concerning temperature data tampering by NOAA and NASA. The explanation of the tampering was nicely presented, and easy to follow.

Thank you, Mr. Coleman. If you (and the others who are exposing this scam) ever get a Nobel Prize for your tireless work (we’re all allowed to dream a little, aren’t we?), I hope you refuse to accept it unless Al Gore and the IPCC return theirs.

Given that the presenter obviously never checked the IPCC reports himself he should have said that.

IPCC – Third Assessment Report (2001), chapter 3, page 203:

“..Whatever the mechanisms involved, lags of up to 2,000 to 4,000 years in the drawdown of CO2 at the start of glacial periods suggests that the low CO2 concentrations during glacial periods amplify the climate change but do not initiate glaciations (Lorius and Oeschger, 1994; Fischer et al., 1999). Once established, the low CO2 concentration is likely to have enhanced global cooling (Hewitt and Mitchell, 1997)…”

[A short extract only to demonstrate the point.]

In fact the whole 3rd chapter is concerned with the complexities of the CO2 cycle. (I’d never read that chapter of the IPCC report but it only took me about 15 minutes to find the relevant chapter and the above citation).

The IPCC agrees with the presenter that CO2 lags temperature changes!

How can this be? Don’t the IPCC realize this destroys their whole hypothesis?? (It doesn’t)

He also brings up, gasp, CO2 is a trace gas. As if to say “I rest my case”. The fact that it’s a “trace gas” is not in contention.

So, my point is, the presenter is either ignorant, or is relying on the ignorance of his audience. Like Al Gore with his movie.

Maybe the rest of it is good, I don’t know I only watched the first video segment, in which he also interviews a few well-known and knowledgeable scientists. They probably know that CO2 lagging temperature in the ice core records doesn’t destroy the hypothesis that CO2 might affect temperatures as well. And they probably don’t believe that CO2 can’t affect the temperature “because it’s a trace gas”.

I’m a skeptic and I don’t believe the certainty of the future temperature rises and the consequent four horsemen of the apocalypse that the IPCC has projected.

But it’s a sad day for skepticism when someone produces this kind of material.

Although you are correct in what you say, we must remember the targeted audience. These are NOT well versed climate tradgics (like us), they are people who most likely got their AGW info from Al Gores movie/dvd. So it makes sense to highlight Al Gores “stuff”. Plus the IPCC report you refer to was launched in 2001, Al Gores movie was produced 2004/5 so he should have known CO2 lagged temps but misrepresented by clever use of words.

This was a TV programme. It has to be made palatable (interesting) for people lest they switch off. So I wouldn’t expect deep deep scientific analysis of the IPCC reports, but rather easier to understand bite sized segments debunking “commonly held” beliefs, most of which comes from Al Gores publicising of AGW. To that end it was an excellent job well done.

The key for me was the data manipulation revealed. Somebody may well run with this info now. Lets hope so.

This is not deep science with complex partial differential equations and many scientific details. It is not meant to be. It is aimed not at debunking the science so much as debunking the summary for policy makers.

I have no doubt that the science is shoddy. But the shoddiest part of this whole scam is the summary for policymakers. So pointing out where the scientific papers agree with Coleman’s presentation is not the point.

The point is that the science only weakly supports a Strong policy. And that may in itself be the reason for the enHansen of the data. Or as I have also said the in another comment the Jonesing of the data.

Mr. Coleman reminded me of somebody I once watched every night.
The voice, the manner.
All he needed to do was put on some thick black-rimmed glasses, and he could do Walter Cronkite on SNL.
Very nice presentation, a must for You Tube.

Well done! I’ve been a John Coleman fan since his days in Chicago, more than 35 years ago. He didn’t mince words and took the right angle: the global warming science is biased. He knows how complex the data sets and manipulations are, but made it simple and easy-to-understand. And Chiefio (E.M. Smith) was awesome. We can only hope this program goes viral on the Internet.

The most important important part of the presentation was his direct public accusation that Michael Mann has committed academic fraud. Overall the presentation was targeted to the layman with just enough science language to make the point. The obvious snearing was good too.

Good Job. Thanks to Anthony Watts for posting and Mr Coleman for presenting.

The big news is E. M. Smith’s “March of the Thermometers” hypothesis. I am confused though about temperature vs. temperature anomaly. Global averages are presented as anomalies, meaning variations above/below an arbitrary time period’s average. If this was done for the input data too, then only the difference in variability of cold vs. hot regions would be modified by the great dying out of thermometers, not the absolute temperatures. There are three non-satellite global averages, GISS, Hadley and NCDC so there are three software packages to ask this question for. Isn’t the whole point of anomalies that using them instead of absolute temperature removes the problem that Smith is making a case for?

At this point it seems like just a battle of news paper headlines. Who can lie the most about man-made global warming and get away with it? It’s like a game. The publishers know the jig is up. More and more rogue articles concerning the truth about man-made global warming are sprouting up everyday like dandelions. It’s just a matter of time before there are more news paper articles telling the truth and out number the ones telling lies.

AGW alarmist have already stated the science does not matter anymore; the debate is over. I say their time is up. Either they produce conclusive evidence that AGW is real or they should be charged with fraud.

I think the seriousness of the scientific facts and their manipulations were somewhat minimized by the musical parodies. Somehow, “Bare Naked Ladies” songs just do not seem to add to this issue. It is one of my favorite songs, however.

Overall I think it was a great summary of where the science stands, and like many others here, I hope it somehow gets out to the general public. I will be sending this link to all of my warmer friends and enemies.

I can see what you’re saying, but Colman is not addressing scientists. He is addressing the general public. Therefore he puts things in simple terms, and starts out by attacking what the general public understands.

Do you think the general public understands the IPCC reports? I am quite certain the general public would be put to sleep by page two of those dreary reports. I know that when I forced myself to read them I was so bored that my eyeballs practically fell out, and I was only able to stay awake by being outraged.

Gore put things to the general public in simple terms. Colman is responding in simple terms.

Those of us who wish to dig deeper are free to do so. Thank God. Scientists, and people with great understanding of computer programming and modeling, can dig even deeper.

My own experience has been that under ever rock you turn over are a whole bunch of worms. However, when I first began expressing my skepticism four years ago, I was treated like I was crazy, or was saying the earth was flat. Nor was response at all friendly. I wasn’t kidded, and treated like a mere fool; I was treated like some sort of criminal.

Opinions are now changing, much to my relief. However people like John Colman deal with the general public on a daily basis, and I imagine they have a better understanding than I do of what the general public is ready to hear.

It would be simple and concise to let the audience know that the IPCC agrees with him. But he claims to debunk the IPCC’s position.

Why is it so confusing for his audience to say “We debunk Al Gore’s movie, and the IPCC agrees that Al Gore’s movie was junk. We don’t agree with the IPCC about future temperature changes as a result of CO2, but in this point we are in agreement.” ?

I simply do not understand the whole issue of reduced number of reporting stations. Certainly there ARE weather stations in Bolivia. Are the data from them not being used? Is this really so? I would like to see more details on this issue.

NASA has issued the following statement in response to the KUSI Special Report. This statement is from Dr. James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City:

“NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis. The analysis utilizes three independent data sources provided by other agencies. Quality control checks are regularly performed on that data. The analysis methodology as well as updates to the analysis are publicly available on our website. The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically based conclusions regarding global temperatures.” (GISS temperature analysis website: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/)
What agencies? cru etc no thank you be prepared for some legal action…

Two weeks ago I wrote an article here about global warming and the advocates — call them warmists — who tamper with Wikipedia to reflect their own biases. One warmist named William Connolley, a green ideologue in Britain, had rewritten 5,428 climate articles. His goal was to bring the articles into line with Green Party dogma.

Joe D’Aleo might like to correct some typos in his document linked to above. I saved a copy to show people but it would be nice to get a clean version.

1. ‘interpolation to vacant data grids’ doesn’t make sense. For vacant data grids or something might be clearer.
2. The latin has no translation and Gandhi’s quote is interesting but mere opinion.
1. The Earth’s population has increased from 1.5 to 6.7 BILLION not million.
2. Rural data ‘includes’ should be included.

No pun intended, but despite the subdued atmosphere I think this show was the knock-out punch. No doom and gloom, no arogant denial or pushing any political buttons. Nope, just a bunch of mostly, uh… old men… speaking plainly, reporting the facts and nothin’ but the facts.

:-)

And I even got a history lesson (Revel). How about that!

Anyway, does anyone know how many people viewed the airing of this? I know KUSI is a small station, but in a big city like San Diego… who knows? It will surely be put up all over the internet and spread in time, though.

The doomsday clock is ticking for Hansen, Gore, Schmidt et al. A bit sound bitey to my English ears but part four was well done. And well done to E.M. Smith. Very clear, very concise and to the point. Nail it on ‘em and make sure it stays nailed!

In my view, the beginning of the media breakthrough! No matter one’s opinion about the quality of this presentation, I realise that this was a mildly-worded piece pitched at a fairly low level to begin to crack open the general trust of the public in so-called ‘authoritative figures’ such as Al Gore and Michael Mann, who have carried out the absolutely fraudulent manipulation of data that the warmist scam is based on.
I would bet a pound to a nob of horse manure that the dear old BBC carries on justifying the unjustifiable, and will be the last media organ to eventually be shamed into reporting the facts.

Nik: Isn’t the whole point of anomalies that using them instead of absolute temperature removes the problem that Smith is making a case for?

Your point would be valid if only long-lived stations were used. Unfortunately, there are only very few really long records, and even most of these consists of data from stations that have been moved around in those locations.

The temperatures are computed for “grid cells” taking into account the temperatures of stations up to 1200 km away when there are no local data. Thus, as E.M.Smith has pointed out, beach thermometers will be used to compute inland temperatures if the inland thermometers are no longer recorded.

(Btw. also see the recent post from Jeff Id of the AirVent to see what happens if you only use the long-lived stations form GHCN)

Smith’s description of reducing and contracting the sample locations towards major lowland population centers is stunning. I am appalled by the implications of it. For me, the damage to the global warming argument is wholly devastating.

Very little remains. A poor understanding of complex climate process has served as the basis for immense, forced posturing.

One day, some of these people are going to wonder why they accepted the “science” of global warming.

My point (which I have put forward here and elsewhere for over 5 years) is that when the sheeple realise that they have been duped, it will reflect badly upon ALL science, not just the AGW charlatans and carpet-baggers.

>>He also brings up, gasp, CO2 is a trace gas.
>>As if to say “I rest my case”. The fact that it’s a
>>“trace gas” is not in contention.

I think you are wrong in both cases. The presenter was trying to counter the general perceptions that have been put across in the media.

The media appear to be saying that:

a. CO2 is the major CAUSE of Global Warming (rather than being a minor augmentation feedback agent).
b. CO2 is being output by the billions of tonnes by industry, and is ‘building up in the atmosphere’. The image is of an atmosphere with 20% CO2 concentration.

And many in the media (not knowing any better) may even believe this. So it is nice to have a truthful argument for a change – even if it was delivered in words of one syllable, with a couple of good points – to put the record straight.

When you want to get people to believe a lie, shock them. When you want to convince them they’ve been had, you need to proceed gently, but firmly and confidently, just as Mr. Coleman is doing. His task is one of deprogramming, not of rocket science.

I’ve watched the fist two, and will finish a bit later time permitting. If #4 is the best, as Anthony says, I’m really looking forward to it, because what I’ve seen so far is masterfully done. Sure, it’s not heavy on detail, but it paints a broad, clear and accurate picture of not only the science, but also the selfish motives of those pushing the falsehoods, as well as the dire consequences for us if we allow them to set the agenda.

‘The sceptics seem to be building up a head of steam here. Maybe we can use this to our advantage to get the series updated. Odd idea to update the proxies with satellite estimates of the lower troposphere rather than surface data.’

[quote scienceofdoom (01:05:16)] :I only watched the first video segment, in which he also interviews a few well-known and knowledgeable scientists. They probably know that CO2 lagging temperature in the ice core records doesn’t destroy the hypothesis that CO2 might affect temperatures as well. And they probably don’t believe that CO2 can’t affect the temperature “because it’s a trace gas”. [/quote]

That’s not the impression I got from the video. It seemed to me they were saying that, overall, the effects of CO2 don’t match the predictions of the IPCC.

And, with all due respect, there’s nothing in your blog post that supports their conclusions either.

We can measure the top of the atmosphere (TOA) energies for out-going long wave radiation and there’s been no significant decrease in that value for the past 20 years. It’s about at the same place in 2002 that it was at in 1983.

Very interesting at useful presentations.
One interesting point here from Joseph D’Aleo’s presentation:
He mentions well established 106 cycle (at -1.35 min time counter) in the solar activity, occasionally Dr. Svalgaard has referred to a108 year solar cycle too. A simple mathematical representation of the medium term of solar cycles can be achieved by 3 simple formulae describing periodicity, amplitude and anomalies. The anomalies formula has approx. 107 year long cycle of low SS cycles combined with reoccurring long solar minima. There is also clear indication of a possible forthcoming solar activity reduction to the level of the mentioned Dalton Minimum.
Result of this graphical analysis can be seen here:

Addressing scienceofdoom’s criticism of CO2 being a trace gas, I wonder if he could find the CO2 molecule here, at it’s illustrated actual atmospheric concentration, if they were moving like real particles?

The rest of the atmosphere doesn’t absorb the radiation, only the CO2, so the only way the CO2 can influence the air it’s surrounded by is kinetically.
Now:
1. how much does the thermal energy of CO2 increase per photon absorbed?
2. how much is the thermal energy of the rest of the atmosphere going to increase under the kinetic influence of the increased energy of the CO2 molecules it contains?

That poor little CO2 molecule ( the lonely little “1” above) sure has it’s work cut out for it.

In this paper, in German, there’s an illustration of Dr. Wood’s experiment of 1909, in which he showed that the greenhouse theory may well be hokum (page 6).

And, in this article, a thoughtful geologist goes into some detail about what is wrong with the “greenhouse” theory, from which it is a little clearly why predicting the future of something about which you have no idea what it’s doing now isn’t science (didn’t we already know that?).

>>yonason (03:29:23) :
>>The rest of the atmosphere doesn’t absorb the
>>radiation, only the CO2,

And that is the other big lie/misrepresentation that has crept into the media, to get perpetuated by the less educated – that CO2 is the primary greenhouse gas.

Fortunately (for us), the rest of the atmosphere DOES absorb and re-radiate long-wave radiation, and the primary agent here is water vapour (approx 95% of the greenhouse affect). I think water should also be outlawed as a dangerous pollutant, and taxed/banned ;-)

So this is another ‘often ignored truth’ that this simple program put across – that CO2 is a minor player in all this. Yes, the program was simplistic and aimed at the lower stratum, but there will still be a lot of people out there with dropped jaws saying, ‘I did not know that’. Are the government lying to us?

I threw in the line about what the scientists interviewed would know as a throw away line. I’m sure they’ve read the IPCC report but let’s ignore that. Obviously they don’t agree with the IPCC’s conclusions and neither do I.

My main point is, did our presenter explain what the IPCC says and explain the problems with it?

He claims he did. But he presented Al Gore’s movie instead. Thereby misleading his viewers.

Deception? Or ignorance? Has he any idea what’s in the IPCC report? If he hasn’t read it, then he shouldn’t be claiming he’s totally debunked it.

He’s making skeptics look bad. Or maybe he is representative of skeptics, in which case, a sad day..

[quote -=NikFromNYC=- (23:24:47) :] Isn’t the whole point of anomalies that using them instead of absolute temperature removes the problem that Smith is making a case for? [/quote]

Yes and no.

Randomly removing thermometers shouldn’t have any effect on the anomalies being measured.

Removing them from rural areas and only leaving them in urban areas will if the anomalies from urban centers are “copied” to rural areas but then not adjusted downward in rural areas to account for the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect present in urban areas.

As an example, if they are taking the anomalies from L.A. and using it for all of California (which is basically what they’re doing) but only adjusting for UHI in L.A., then you’ll get higher anomalies than you should get throughout nearly all of California.

Is this what’s actually going on? I don’t know. We’d need to see the source code for how these adjustments are done.

“My main point is, did our presenter explain what the IPCC says and explain the problems with it?”

That isn’t the point of the presentation. What he’s done is to bring viewers up to speed on the lies they are immersed in. There is no point in addressing a topics most haven’t a clue how to understand. They have been brainwashed and need to be deprogrammed, and he has done a magnificent job of that.

Isn’t the whole point of anomalies that using them instead of absolute temperature removes the problem that Smith is making a case for?

If you were using the same set of thermometers throughout then perhaps it would.

Take a hypothetical region with very mixed geography. It is 1965 and you have 100 well distributed stations. You derive a base line of 15C for the region from all 100 thermometers. Fast forward to 2010 and you now have 4 thermometers and they are all in the warmer parts of the region (airports/city/beach for example). Averaging the current 4 you get 16.5C in 2010. The anomaly though is calculated using the 1965 regional base level… 16.5-15 to give a +1.5C anomaly for the region.

Our analysis concerns only temperature anomalies, not absolute temperature. Temperature anomalies are computed relative to the base period 1951-1980. The reason to work with anomalies (…)

Now take a look at the number of stations (middle graph top of page) available between 1951-1980 compared to the present and also note that this was a period of cooling following the 30’s/40’s. Even if temperatures were to return, in reality, to 1950-80 levels I seriously doubt the anomalies will ever reflect that.

I’m in Australia and would like to preserve the doco so I can show some friends.
What would be the best bit of software I could use on an XP box to capture and save it onto the HDD.
A great video, none of this stuff gets into the media here. I’m going to push it out wherever I can.

Steve Case (01:05:25) :
I simply do not understand the whole issue of reduced number of reporting stations. Certainly there ARE weather stations in Bolivia. Are the data from them not being used? Is this really so? I would like to see more details on this issue.

Can someone explain me the reason of the sudden steep increase in global temperatures, as can be seen on the UAH site?
I thought El Nino wasn’t that strong to cause this, large parts (of course not all) of the northern hemisphere were cold the last weeks, the DMI arctic temperatures graph also shows a decline in temperature…
So is this al coming from El Nino?

No No say it isn’t so, sob sob..
AGW kills thermometers too?
Where will it all end.
They never hurt anyone, cute little fellas, so quiet in the medicine cupboards and temp stations of the world..
Waaah waah, sniff.hiccough.
etc etc
:-)

magicjava (03:15:38) :
We can measure the top of the atmosphere (TOA) energies for out-going long wave radiation and there’s been no significant decrease in that value for the past 20 years. It’s about at the same place in 2002 that it was at in 1983.

Which is exactly as it should be.
By the way I just watched the first segment and I hope it gets better because that was terrible.

Ahh, “our” E.M. Smith (Chiefio) — great explanations. Ahh, John Coleman — an imaginative and informative way to educated a large public. A+ job all around. And Heather Moore’s quizes? Well, I bet many viewers wanted to stay around for the answers. Anyone else remember Jennifer at WKRP?

Thanks, Anthony, for helping this production go viral.

I am looking forward to jail time for the perps of scientific (and financial) fraud.

And we have a date from Chiefio — 1989. We can see that there was (nefarious) planning afoot. Next we need a detective novel, or reporting. Who wanted
WARMING? Why, for what purposes? Who paid for it? And why (the unanswerable) would scientists and public servants prostitute themselves for these purposes. If there is not accountabiliyty, there is no hope for truth — or justice — or a free society.

magicjava (04:10:38) :
As an example, if they are taking the anomalies from L.A. and using it for all of California (which is basically what they’re doing) but only adjusting for UHI in L.A., then you’ll get higher anomalies than you should get throughout nearly all of California.

Is this what’s actually going on? I don’t know. We’d need to see the source code for how these adjustments are done.

1. Present recalculated data for the 1000 or so stations currently used by GISS to show how the earth’s temperature has changed IN THOSE LOCATIONS. That’s useful to know, after all.
2. Require NASA/GISS to recalculate for all the other 5000 stations to show what has happened there. This, of course, presumes that they didn’t throw that data away
3. If they DID throw it away, determine whether the source countries still retain it for their own purposes and, if so, request that they allow it to be resubmitted for further calculation, AS LONG AS the data has been maintained in a way which will not allow modification, manipulation etc.
4. Present the results, no matter what they show, to the general public. If it’s really warming, we’d like to know. If it’s warmed less, but we’re still warming, that’s good to know. If it’s cooling in significant parts of the world, that’s important if we depend on food grown there. Etc etc etc.

This really isn’t too hard to do.

The other key question now is this: do we trust the weather stations? Are they maintained properly, situated properly etc etc?

This isn’t 9/11, it’s not World War III. But it IS necessary to start from the ground up, rebuilding faith and trust in climate science.

Because it’s important. Used properly it can enhance life and minimise death.

Thanks for putting the videos up – I’d really have regretted if I’d not been able to watch them.
Even if ChiefIO, a.k.a E.M.Smith, will get more hot ears from all the praise heaped upon him – he really socked it to them. It was good that what he’d worked out so diligently on his blog is now available for a huge, lay audience.

One more thing: watching the Chinese astrophysicist, it occurred to me that these green AGM taxes on carbon fuels will not just make life a misery for Joe Public.
It means that all our high powered scientific institutions, which need a lot of energy to run experiments – especially physicists and astrophysicists – won’t have enough funds to run those experiments.
Thus its not just the economies in the Western World which will suffer. All our advanced science laboratories, doing the hard science we all need to have a better future, will have their research severely impeded, if not curtailed altogether.

I leave it to your imagination what this will entail for all of us, around the globe.

I am torn in how to respond. I am very skeptical of CAGW scenarios and see the CRU emails and related files as evidence of unethical and unscientific behavior – but they are not sufficent in themselves to dismiss the notion of significant AGW nor is this presentation. The simple fact that the number of stations was reduced does not invalidate the trend data – even though it looks remarkably odd. The piece does not connect the dots. In this respect it is no better or worse than Al Gore’s movie.
The argument that the over-simplifications and distortions are justified because the goal is to inform those who are not familiar with the details of the issue – is unpersuasive to say the least.
My concern is that it is too easy to show the flaws in the piece and thereby dismiss more scientifically and rigorously constructed arguments. I had the same reaction to the recent Not Evil, Just Wrong.
That said, thanks for providing access to the show. I hope it leads to more detailed discussions.

I seem to recall a blogger caught them outright when they released, to the media, temperature data from GISS announcing that last October was the warmest ever when in fact they posted the September information instead.

When confronted with this faux pas, the spokesman admitted they trusted the data from GISS and didn’t check it before giving it to the media. So much for quality control.

There is more length to the records than NASA GISS, NCDC and CRU allow for.
That is part & parcel of their half-truths.
The manipulation/erasure of data goes deep, and they all know it.
Joe D’Aleo knows it, and I know it too. I see it firsthand, and my conversation with NCDC is an exercise in futility as they circularly evade. ANYBODY who digs for records will soon come to find out just how bad it really is. It’s ugly, and we all pay taxes to have our precious data butchered.

Ok, he’s talking about station dropout in video 4. He says something to the effect of there being 4 stations in California. But when I look at Anthony’s distribution of stations on surfacestations.org, there are many more than 4 stations in California.

Is he saying that when it comes time to do the math, only data from 4 stations is used?

I hope this leads, not to more circular conversations with bloody hands, but with some serious dismissals of agency heads and perpetrators who have participated in this hoax. Nobody is getting anywhere with these people.
They have literally handcuffed themselves to their warming agenda and models. While the world cools and the climate changes, all they can do now is to watch thier forecasting disintegrate.

However we should bear in mind that a therrmometer only measures its immediate micro climate. It might start off in parkland on the edge of a small town which then develops into a city-hence a considerable UHi effect which is not properly accounted for.

More likely it has been moved from its original position and therefore it records a micro climate completely unrelated to its origins. A favourite place these days is next to runways on an Airport-this can have a dramatic effect on temperature.

One of many examples I have collected is at Bologna Italy where the station moved from its ancient University parkland location to here-Marconi Airport.

“Is he saying that when it comes time to do the math, only data from 4 stations is used?”

Yep. It seems that the thermometric reading stations that were not recording warmer temperatures had their outputs dropped from the federal government’s datasets. They didn’t cease to exist. Their readings just ceased to be figured into the regional temperature assessments, and the areas where the weather stations were located got “homogenized” into other areas at lower altitudes and closer proximity to warming sources like the coastline, etc.

This is nothing more than deliberate fraud. Purposeful “cooking of the books.” Lying.

Given that it was done on the taxpayers’ dime by officers of the civil government itself (or contractors engaged by the government), it constitutes malfeasance in public office, and that’s a criminal offense.

you keep bringing up the IpCC reports asserting that these reports are supposed to be the ultimate authority. They are not. Openheimmer, a major man made global warming proponent, relented when questioned about the make up of the IPCC. he said that only 20% of the IPCC panel consisted of people that have ANY knowledge of the climate. The rest of the panel are economists, envioromentalists and other non-climate scientists. Furthermore, of these 20% most of these scientists do not agree with the upper levels of the UN and have their research, or comments removed by Banter, another man made global warming proponent. Some of these scientists have threatened to sue to get their names off of these reports but the UN does not want to take their names off as it ruins the UN propaganda that all the scientists are in agreement. The IPCC is really run but a handful of people so stop saying to read teh IPCC report when it is nothing but a political report sanctioned by the upper levels at the UN>

rabidfox (21:59:26) said:
With the possible (but not probable) exception of FOX, this program won’t be aired on any other TV station. Thanks for making it available here.

Do not despair!
(a) check the ratings for Fox. They are wiping the floor with every other cable outlet, and threatening the networks
(b) as the father of two “millenials” (one premed and one in grad school) I can assure you that internet exposure (particularly an organic, so-called “viral” exposure) is exponentially more important than ANY mainstream medium.

My observation is that news has become Non-Newtonian; that is, it’s now “shear-rate dependent”. The FASTER it accelerates, the FARTHER it moves.

The MSM are stuck with an old Newtonian, linear model of “‘legs”; that is, that there’s a linear relationship between “coverage” (meaning the MSM imprimateur) and “import”. Ain’t true. The dominate factor now is dv/dt; I suppose the engineering units of that would be “internet hits per second per second”.

“…I am very skeptical of CAGW scenarios and see the CRU emails and related files as evidence of unethical and unscientific behavior – but they are not sufficient in themselves to dismiss the notion of significant AGW….”

They need not be. In situations like this one, the mindset of medical diagnosis must be applied. Think of the way that physician Arthur Conan Doyle modeled the methods of his character Sherlock Holmes upon Dr. Joseph Bell, under whom Doyle served a clinical clerkship in 1877.

The process of diagnosis begins with what will almost always appear to the untrained mind to be insignificant information. A patient’s gait, the color of his skin, the distribution and texture of the hair on his head, innumerable other characteristics. These indicators as well as elements of the patient’s past history may be unrelated to his presenting complaint, but commonly give evidence of significant pathology.

The physician, observing such superficially unrelated phenomena, has a duty to the patient to pursue evaluation to rule out that pathology to be best of his ability. Failure to do so constitutes professional malpractice.

Is this understood?

Bernie, I suspect that you are not trained in either the sciences in general or in diagnosis particularly.

What is found in the Climategate data dump (only a small part of which is made up of the e-mails you mention) is like that first glance at the patient as he walks into the clinic.

Hell, it’s much, much more. The “patient” in the Climategate case is a gaunt, cyanotic, glassy-eyed, shambling individual whose skin is pale, taut, and bereft of perspiration, his breathing shallow, his clothes hanging loose upon his frame.

The Climategate case is hellacious pathology, right from the git-go. And every deeper look into the details thereof has been demonstrating – without fail – that the disease is real, it’s incredibly serious, and it’s got to be addressed.

That disease is rank and pervasive corruption in support of massive fraud.

And, yes, it’s been perpetrated by officers of the U.S. government.

For you to take an essentially “agnostic” position on this subject is irresponsible in the extreme.

Hell, were you a fellow physician, I’d report you to the hospital administration as a dangerous liability risk, and to the pertinent professional societies as having breached standard of care.

As it’s going to take 3 years for the CRU investigation into Jones to come to fruition in UK it is good to see the US able to short-circuit this and set the ball rolling right now. I see that Hansen has issued a denial so expect legals to follow – goody !
This criminal exposure combined with the attached discovery that CO2 has already done all it can do to the climate somewhat defuses the AGW case.
Just how the libtards will climb down from their castle in the air will be fascinating to see – one hopes it will be voluntary and with some dignity rather than at their embarrassing ‘day in court’.

Is he saying that when it comes time to do the math, only data from 4 stations is used?

Yes. I have relations and friends all over No. Calif., and they were totally msytified that the late summer and early fall we all experienced was somehow
turned into the Xth warmest in history.
What E.M. Smith has described is how they did that.
They cheated by not using the vast majority of the temperature data.

I enjoyed Part 4—the meat of the show—and even though the presenter came across like Ray Goulding (from Bob and Ray, my fav deadpan comedians), he presented his argument for his audience; i.e. the people who were shown on the “Man in the Street” interviews.
What struck me most was the deletion of data stations in the late ’80s early ’90s. When was that decision made, who made it, and why?

NikFromNYC=- (23:24:47) :” Isn’t the whole point of anomalies that using them instead of absolute temperature removes the problem that Smith is making a case for?”

Let’s say you want to make a comparison of New York Yankee teams for offensive effectiveness. Take the team batting average of the 1956 Yankees using all the team members batting averages ( which includes pitchers and subs). Now take the 2009 team batting average but only use the averages of the starting 8 plus designated hitter (which does not include any pitchers or subs). Use those figures to see which has a higher batting average anomaly against the batting average of the entire team history of all Yankee batters. Not really a good way to do this is it.

Prince Philip:1) For eco/environmental programs to be successful, it needed the religions of the world to invest it with some sort of “spiritual imperative”;
2) Religious leaders can then influence their own people, especially in backward countries with high illiteracy, to the cause of ecology and environmentalism. Prince Philip explained, “In many parts of the world, the only person with influence is the local religious leader.”

NASA has issued the following statement in response to the KUSI Special Report. This statement is from Dr. James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City:

“NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis. The analysis utilizes three independent data sources provided by other agencies. Quality control checks are regularly performed on that data. The analysis methodology as well as updates to the analysis are publicly available on our website. The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically based conclusions regarding global temperatures.”

NASA can say they have not manipulated any data and probably be correct but the problem it seems to me is in the statistical methods used compute meaningful information across multiple sets of the data. Even a layman can understand the problem with some data sets having temperature readings from cold regions while other data sets omit these temperature readings. Shouldn’t this introduce some pretty significant errors in any kind of trend analysis? This part of the puzzle does not seem too difficult to understand.

If the raw data exists then will someone please take on the task of recomputing global temperatures. If you are going to strike stations, strike the urban stations since their data can’t be trusted. Better yet, Anthony did a survey of the USA stations. What if only data from those stations that passed siting standards were used? What would the temperature record look like then?

According to Richard Tol on January 12, 2010, at http://umbrellog.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?p=95688#p95688 the following statement – “Summary for Policy Makers is very selective, up to the point of twisting the chapters’ findings beyond recognition. In case of SAR WG3 Chapter 6, this was done against the will of the authors. The IPCC has learned from that. The selection process for authors is now more careful (awkward people like myself are not welcome) and there is self-selection too (David Pearce withdrew).” Richard Tol

CLIMATE POLICY—FROM RIO TO KYOTO
A Political Issue for 2000—and Beyond

(In particular refer to page 19/20: ‘Politics Enters into Drafting the IPCC Report.’ Here examples are given of ‘substantial changes … made between the time when the report was approved in Madrid and the time it was printed.The convening lead author, Ben Santer, readily admitted to making these changes.)

DR (07:01:58) :
The counter argument is the satellite data and surface records tell the same story so it does not matter if the surface data has been manipulated.

I think you’re missing the point. Can you show me satellite data for the base period from 1950-1980? Is the current atsmospheric anomaly different from say, 1930-1940? Was the MWP warmer than now? Do climate cycles exist?
Calibrating the curve to the period 1950-1980, adjusting all temperatures prior to 1990 downward, then comparing that to a 30 year satellite record leaves a little to be desired.

I was certainly glad to see this airing at least somewhere in the US, however, I was not thrilled with the presentation. First of all, although the female presenting the questions at the end of each segment was a pleasure to look at, the whole concept of the quizzes was unnecessary. Additionally, I would have preferred if John did not come righ out presenting his side of the global warming debate as undeniable fact and that the alarmists are wrong. I firmly believe that the alarmists are wrong and that scientific fraud was committed, but I would have preferred John to present both sides and question the viewer to draw their own conclusions. Anyone who would watch this program and then do some web surfing to try to collect info on this for their own decision making process, would most certainly come out on the right side.

The issue is not whether CO2 initiated past glaciations, although I recently participated in a forum with a Lehigh Univ professor who presented graphics in which he made that inference (wouldn’t come right out and say it, but the message was there until I came on). The point of this is that the paleoclimatological record does NOT show that CO2 causes temperature increases – it shows that past CO2 spikes were caused by temperature increases. The reason for focussing on Gore is that long after the climate community recognized what geologists already knew, Gore’s propaganda piece – all of it – is founded on a known LIE over cause and effect between T and CO2 in the geologic past. The oar that the IPCC shoved in is nothing more than speculation that increased or decreased CO2 could have been a factor in glaciation and interglacial episodes as a dampening or amplifying factor.

The point is a simple one about solubility of gases in liquids and where the CO2 comes from NATURALLY, and how its increases and decreases in the geologic past are a record of natural climate variability which had NO effect on the paleoclimate but was, rather, CAUSED BY the paleoclimate. I have been demonstrating it to my Intro classes for years and years using a warm bottle of seltzer, a chilled bottle of seltzer and two volunteers, one of which is about to get really wet.

Mike Ramsey (07:24:47) :
If the raw data exists then will someone please take on the task of recomputing global temperatures.

I’ve looked into that for a local station. The problem I encountered is if you download what they call the “Raw Data” from the NCDC, it has already been adjusted for TOBS, site changes, etc. The raw data only exists (at least in the USA) on the original scaned monthly data sheets sent to the NCDC. To get these you must pay a fee for each years data, then transcribe them yourself. For 5000 or so stations the cost is in the millions. Understand, I’m not saying the NCDC doesn’t have the raw data in some downloadable format, only that they are trying to obfuscate it’s utilization. If someone is sure they have obtained the absolute raw data, please inform me.

I can’t see where the IPCC says Gores film is rubbish.
In their AR4 SPM they say “The atmospheric concentration
of carbon dioxide in 2005 exceeds by far the natural
range over the last 650,000 years (180 to 300 ppm) as
determined from ice cores”.

The general public knows the above, even though they didn’t read the report, but how? Because they saw it on Al Gores movie, he had to get up on a hoist to point where the CO2 level was heading, a great visual ploy.
So debunking Al Gore there was the same as debunking the IPCC, afterall, Al Gore is their quasi or proxy conduit to the populace, and it’s that populace the presenter was trying to reach.

I believe he did a very good job, and i believe this was a good day for skeptics. IMHO

Mike Ramsey (07:24:47) :
If the raw data exists then will someone please take on the task of recomputing global temperatures.

I’ve looked into that for a local station. The problem I encountered is if you download what they call the “Raw Data” from the NCDC, it has already been adjusted for TOBS, site changes, etc. The raw data only exists (at least in the USA) on the original scaned monthly data sheets sent to the NCDC. To get these you must pay a fee for each years data, then transcribe them yourself. For 5000 or so stations the cost is in the millions. Understand, I’m not saying the NCDC doesn’t have the raw data in some downloadable format, only that they are trying to obfuscate it’s utilization. If someone is sure they have obtained the absolute raw data, please inform me.

Tom I’m going to go out on a lim here a guess you are not in the US. The reason I say this is that as a US citizen with a US IP address I a can access the scanned paper copies NCDC maintains as a PDF page. Unfortunately you only get one page at a time and have to hand transcribe. Here is the link I use to get in:

On the page it has this:
Your Access is Free
(xxx-xx-xxx-xxx.client.mchsi.com)

I personnally in my spare time have started work on the State College PA paper record, loggin by hand the Tmax, Tmin and Tmean for each month. It is slow going because for some of the records it looks like the scanner couldn’t handle old carbon copies of the records and it is hard to read. After about an hour your eyes want to bleed.

Mike Ramsey (07:24:47) :If the raw data exists then will someone please take on the task of recomputing global temperatures.

At this point I’m seriously wondering, “Why bother?” Given the satellite and geophysical records as recorders, we need to start over on any other surface recording and I’m not going to trust the Gov’t to have anything to do with it, nor the Universities, who haven’t done hardly anything of use either. At this point I’ve about got more faith in the Russians! They never bought AGW to begin with.

Spread the word folks,spread the word, get your favorite websites to link to the story.MSM may pick up on this yet and with luck Christopher Booker on the UK Telegraph may showcase it. I will give up drinking ale forever if it makes the BBC.

From the link posted by Bill Tuttle
“The latest example of this is a $500,000 grant to Michael Mann, Professor at Penn State University and unintended c0-star of the ClimateGate e-mail scandal. The leaked e-mails revealed collaboration among scientists to stifle dissenting views on the extent of man-made global warming.”

I think this coverage was a bit too one sided. You should not lead off a piece of journalism with a line like “There is no man made global warming” unless you have 100% conclusive proof that there is no man made global warming. The “I want you to open your mind for an hour…” line was condescending and does our side no good at all. And Coleman licking the boots of his experts in interviews and asking no tough questions at all…not to mention not having someone…even one person…on from the warming alarmist side…didn’t do us any favors either.

Bad journalism all the way around…and I was so hoping this would feel like a real report and maybe convince a few people.

An excellent program. My jaw hit the floor when that girl said that in order to reduce her global footprint she was picking up after her dog, and recycling. I wish Coleman had asked her how exactly dog turds lead to global warming. But it just illustrates what the government and IPCC already know: people are generally stupid. And the Stupid are easily manipulated.

I think you may be missing the point. While the IPCC addresses the lag in CO2 decrease at the start of a glaciation period, the more damning evidence is the lag in CO2 increase at the start of a warmer period — proving that temperature increases can happen quite naturally without being invoked by increases in CO2.

“High-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to 100 parts per million by volume 600 ± 400 years after the warming of the last three deglaciations.”

tucci:
As I noted there are certainly plenty of “pathologies” visible in the CRU emails. Moreover, if your point is that the whole global temperature record is somewhat bizarre, I do not disagree. However, the point at issue is the effectiveness of this particular presentation. Most of the claims will be readily dismissed by the scientific establishment. What was needed and what I did not see in the video were specific proof points – not hand waving – beyond the summary chart that showed the effect of before and after the change in the number of stations (upon which more time should have been spent). For example, if you charge that Bolivia cannot be represented by 2 temperature stations show the pattern in the Bolivian stations that do exist. If California should not be represented by four stations, show what happens when you include the “cool” stations that have been dropped.
Please do not misunderstand. I have followed this debate since before Anthony’s Stevenson screen experiments. I do have a pretty strong background in data analysis. I am very skeptical as to the quality of the underlying temperature data, the ability of many climate scientists to maintain their objectivity and the underlying agenda of many CAGW advocates.

For those of you who are experiencing eye strain, may I suggest “Computer Readers” made by Magnavision and sold at Staples for about $27, which are reading glasses made especially for viewing computer screens. They come in powers of 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, and more. The link is:

I spend 13 hours a day, 6 days a week in front of dual monitors and about a year ago my eyes couldn’t take it any longer. The squinting and tears went away the first day after I got a pair of these “Computer Readers”.

Disclaimer: I don’t own stock in either Magnavision or Staples. :) I just know how debilitating it can be not to see clearly when work requires it. (Switching to DVI monitors also helped since they give a sharper image.)

J.Peden (08:51:23) : It’s come to the point that no one believes any more in “Hollywood Scientists” a la “Al Baby” famous “scientist” and Nobel prize laureate, just check around with your senses if it is cold or warm.

John A (20:39:00) : Said: It won’t be reported by the BBC. Guaranteed.

Not in Norwich, that’s for sure. Just seen this in the local paper:

” The Norwich Independent Climate Change Commission” They have produced a 24 page PDF document which opens with the typical scary picture of a power station chimney, pouring forth smoke. No mention of the recent scandal just down the road. Link to the article here:

Based on the NASA repsonse they have no defense. Simply stating they stand by their analysis is the equivalent of admiting they are quilty. If they had anything stronger you can bet it would be highlighted in big bold letter.

If the raw data exists then will someone please take on the task of recomputing global temperatures.

At this point I’m seriously wondering, “Why bother?”

Satellite temperature data does not go back far enough. We need data at least from the entire 20th century.

In terms of manual data entry, it would be best to have two different people enter the same data so that it can be compared to catch typos. However, Optical Character scanners that recognize handwriting might work, especially if it is only numbers that are being scanned. Numbers tend to be printed and this what advanced OCRs can handle.

Maybe this is another project that Anthony can coordinate with volunteer WUWT readers each doing a portion of the typing?

Boballab
Could you not download the page, print it out and then apply an OCR to it?

When you start out from the page you have to select the state from a menu, then from that you get a menu of all the stations fro that state, you select one and from that it takes you to another menu that runs by year and month. So for the year 2008 and for State College PA, there is 12 different links and you have to select each one. From there it searchs their database and gives you a link to the page which is this:

Now here is the kicker: For just this one station that goes back to 1893 that means pulling up roughly 1,392 pages (if no months/years missed on the record). So I can’t see putting out the cost of the ink/paper to print out almost 1,400 pages, then spend the time to scan it back in just for 3 readings per page.

Also some of the PDF’s do not have good scans of them and the stuff is very faint, here is and example of that:

My observation is that news has become Non-Newtonian; that is, it’s now “shear-rate dependent”. The FASTER it accelerates, the FARTHER it moves.

The MSM are stuck with an old Newtonian, linear model of “‘legs”; that is, that there’s a linear relationship between “coverage” (meaning the MSM imprimateur) and “import”.

An excellent analysis. The speed with which Climategate spread across the blogosphere is an example. MSM is locked into fixed windows and time slots that are meaningless to realtime internet transactions. That story so dominated the internet the MSM looked lame at first and then complicit in avoiding an obvious elephant in the room.

People are starting to understand – if you want news and information closer to the truth (by any definition) – get online and do some homework. An excellent lesson in self-informed, independent thinking. Even Thoreau would be impressed.

Dave thanks for your help. I’ve already got the latest Flash, I’ve installed Download helper and still it’s no use – when I go to the KUSI page and it says, Click below, there is only a blank area and no “hand” appearing to indicate anything at all to click onto.

I think some of you are misunderstanding the audience and intent of this video series. It was not aimed at scientifically sophisticated people who are naturally curious, it was aimed at a general public audience who on average have limited mathematical and scientific skills. It was aimed at the same sort of folks that can be convinced by a commercial that my laundry detergent is better than their laundry detergent because is smells better and my friends compliment me about my white shirts.

It is not pitching “scientific proof” it is sowing the seeds of doubt. It is like the door left ajar, that makes people say to them selves — “Hmmmm that is odd” and entices them to open the door and see what the funny noises are in the other room.

Before you can convince, you must create interest and curiosity.

That was the objective. Create just enough doubt that the curious start to dig for themselves, and the true believers acknowledge that others with more scientific skills than they have discovered a “door ajar”. That makes it possible for the true believer to re-examine facts they previously accepted as settled, as beliefs subject to change.

I suspect that like climate gate itself this will slowly grow, it will not go viral explosively like some topics but will be like a rising tide where it slowly infiltrates emails to friends, comments in chat rooms, postings on web forums. That slow growth will errode the certainty many feel about the topic.

Pooh (09:20:14) :-“Has anyone got the videos to play? It does not play for me.
Firefox 3.5.7, Flash 10.0.r42, and Flashblock 1.5.11.2 (with and without both sites white listed, then with Flashblock disabled)”

Pooh, I am running Firefox 3.5.7 with Flash 10.0.r42 but without Flashblock downloaded and can see the videos fine. When clicking on the link at the top it opens the kusi website in a new tab, then just click on the video there to start.

NCDC is providing limited access to some of the summaries, but they are not providing feasible access to the original manuscript forms of the surface weather observations such as the Form WBAN-10. This is the form used by the Weather Bureau, Air Force, and Navy to officially record the daily, 12HR, 6HR, 3HR, 1HR, and speacial surface weather observations before transmission by data communications network, telephone, or mail to the appropriate government agency for quality control and climate data archiving. Summaies do not report much of the observations and data recorded on this form. The data recorded on this form is subject to a variety of quality control procedures and adjustments when they are reconciled to parallel data transmissions and the secondary summaries presently available in the datasets.

I have tried occassionally over the years to gain access to the Form WBAN-10 records I originated many years ago. As recently as last month, NCDC informed me that I would have to request a customized purchase quotation for their contractor to search, retrieve, and copy the form or forms I wished to obtain from NCDC, and the cost would likely be not less than about $60.00 per form retrieved. Naturally, a paygate or paywall of that size makes it financially impossible to copy or compile the original raw data observations for a meaningful time period directly from the original manuscript records for even one observation station, much less thousands of such stations.

To make matters worse, on more than one occassion I have been informed by workers at NCDC that some of the original manuscript records were subjected to water damage and are being destroyed by white worms (larvae) from insect infestations eating the original manuscripts. They did not say which of the manuscript records or how much of the manuscript records are affected, except to say it may be significant. If the surface weather observation forms are among any significantly damaged manuscript collections, we may be permanently losing access to those records.

I reported this problem with negligance of the manusript archive by telephone to a staffer in U.S. Senator Inhofe’s office, and I suggested an investigation of the extent of the damage, if any, be conducted, and the surviving records and/or images be preseserved from any further destruction and loss.

Access to the original maunscript records is important, because analysis of the original obervations can settle many disputes about post-observation corrections, adjustments, and methodological artifacts in the summaries and dependent studies. Arguments about the effects of TOBS (Time of Observation) adustments can be understood better by examining the hourly and special observations omitted in all of the summaries. The effects of FROPA (frontal passage) is an example where sharp differences in MIN/MAX air temperatures are irregular when post-processing adjustments attempt to apply standard adjustment procedures for TOBS calculations. Some regions of the continent are subject to more frequent frontal passages with more dramtaic differences in air temperatures in different parts of the day than are assumed for TOBS claculations. Having the hourly and special observations could pinpoint such differences in the consequences of using various methodologies.

Suffice it to say, if anyone cares about the preservation of these records, they had better act before its too late to stop their destruction.

“The counter argument is the satellite data and surface records tell the same story so it does not matter if the surface data has been manipulated.”

Dr.,
But they don’t tell the same story. The surface trends as depicted by these organizations (esp GISS) are statistical outliers (on the positive side). Yes, the trends are the same, but the degress of warming is what’s at issue. Remember, the anomalies are based on 30 year means. And it is what interval that is chosen that matters. NOAA and NASA use 30 year cold periods to build thier anomaly charts.

Pooh, I forgot to mention that if you’re not getting the new tab or the video doesn’t play from there you might check the Error Console under the tools tab and see if any errors are being reported. It’s been a few years since I encountered a significant bug in Firefox but you might turn in a trouble ticket with them. My experience dealing with them on a bug was a positive one.

Wow! What a coup with the data manipulation segment. I sat with my mouth agape. Well done to E M Smith.

This ties in extremly well to the Russian report that claimed only 25% of Russian station data was being used. If anyone dismissed that as politicaly motivated mischeif making, then think again! E.M. Smith has not only confirmed this claim, but has discovered that this happened not only with the Russian stations, but is in fact world wide. How can there still be any doubt over the AGW hoax? This must be the death blow.

I hope E.M. Smith can come over here and maybe answer some questions about how he found what he did.

I am familiar with that site on NCDC with the pdf’s of the scanned originals.
Unfortunately, there appears to have been some changes made, as some of the pdf’s are scans of paper done recently. They are too clean, lack a signature, and don’t look to bear the marks of age as they should. Comparing them to the reported temps and precip data from newpapers of the time, I know why.
Some years and some months in years match, but therein lies evidence of potential tampering.
What a tangled web this has turned out to be.

Ok, he’s talking about station dropout in video 4. He says something to the effect of there being 4 stations in California. But when I look at Anthony’s distribution of stations on surfacestations.org, there are many more than 4 stations in California.

Is he saying that when it comes time to do the math, only data from 4 stations is used?

It’s actually a bit more complicated than that; but in 9 minutes of video for the general public you can’t put in every detail and caveat.

(Yes, I was up late dealing with ‘the flood’ [ in a good way ;-) ] and I’ll be working through the comments and questions now that I’ve got tea in hand.)

I have not yet gotten to watch the video, but what I said (hope it came through editing) was that “In GHCN” there are 4 stations. Now, up until about a month ago only four survived in GIStemp as well. (They used the USHCN added to GHCN but USHCN ‘cut off’ in May 2007). As of a few weeks back, they swapped to USHCN Version 2 (that does carry forward more thermometers into the present). Problem solved? Hardly.

USHCN Version 2 has a new “adjustment” re-cooking method used (“peer” reviewed, of course) that puts in lots of new warming tilt. See the blink chart link here:

Mike McMillan (17:28:30) :

I’ve completed USHCN vs USHCN version 2 blink comparison charts for Wisconsin. As with the Illinois charts, the majority of stations had their raw data adjusted to show more warming by lowering the temperatures in the first half of the 20th century.
That brings the raw data more in line with the GISS homogenized versions. I haven’t blinked the original GISS with the new homogenized charts yet, but I’d bet a nickle they’ll show even more warming.

So I had the choice of going down the rabbit hole of GIStemp in the past vs GIStemp of a couple of weeks ago vs all the temp series that use only GHCN vs…

For TV, you just stick in “GHCN has” – not the whole detailed rats nest of revised revisions of changed modified versions of the temperatures.

I figure that story of “They put the thermometers back in, but had to cook them first!!” will make a nice follow on story ;-)

But back to the point made above:

GHCN still has only 4 on the beach in California. Yes, there are other thermometers in California and you can find the data, but GHCN is what all the major Global Temperature Series use. Furthermore, GIStemp had only GHCN used from May 2007 until just a few weeks ago. I will happily publish a “gee, they DO use more as of December when they changed their code and process AGAIN” as soon as they publish a “Gee, we’re sorry we grossly mislead the public for 3 years and tried to hide it with a swap of datasets last month. We are retracting all the hysteria driven press releases about excess warming in the USA from that time period.”

So what I said is factually correct AND correct in spirit even for GIStemp.

FWIW, anyone who would like a bit of fame could most likely get it via taking the USHCN the GHCN (both unadjusted and adjusted) and the USHCN.v2 and plotting all 4 values on the same chart. Then just ask one question: These are all published by NOAA / NCDC as correct and valid. So which one is the really valid one? (There are 3 F differences in some of them, to the warming side, naturally…)

Seven total lines. All different. All supposedly “correct” in some way. All different. All different by more than the AGW signal.

One final point:

I’m now getting a few “fleas” that have decided to try chewing on me. Here is a quote from another site:

Well guess where the tortured numbers pop up again. Three points to the guy in the corner who said, gee, that’s just the sort of thing that Joe D’Aleo would love and five to the lady in the black hat who said, that’s so good it should be featured on the new KUSI blockbuster show we set our TIVO to capture when we went to the tea party. It would be nice to see a libel suit dropped on these clowns, but it’s time to saddle up and point out that the icecap man is melting. Oh yeah, here is the “programming expert”, please help undress him

There is more of the usual, the number of stations has fallen over the past thirty years, etc. Pushback will be needed.

It is both amusing to see that the attack dog spirit is alive and well and at the same time a bit sad. Somehow folks on “the other side” just don’t “get it” that it’s not about me it’s about the data. Frankly, like so many others, I started on this with the idea that (as another comment put it) “There’s smoke, lets go see where the fire is”. But when I looked, I found a guy putting wet leaves on a BBQ…

Take a picture of that and show it to folks, some how it becomes you that is the “issue”… Just bizzare.

So much hate and invective. So much focus on shooting the messenger. Just amazing.

At any rate “The truth just is. -E.M.Smith” and they will have to deal with that.

So if I get a load of fleas, don’t be surprised if I go quiet for a while as I find the DDT cannister and dust some all over…

Dave thanks for your help. I’ve already got the latest Flash, I’ve installed Download helper and still it’s no use – when I go to the KUSI page and it says, Click below, there is only a blank area and no “hand” appearing to indicate anything at all to click onto.

I hope this will get put onto U-tube.

I take it then that you are going directly to these KUSI pages and it does not let you click on the video graphic ?

I’d love to see Gavin or someone address this directly and in detail. I found the program and the supporting documentation on the blogs very convincing as to the horrors of what’s been done to the surface temp record. Having said that, I try not to make up my mind until the other side has had the opportunity to provide their own rebuttal.

I thought both the progam and the blog data was very well done. I’d known about the dropouts, I knew they were felt to bias the trend data warmer, but I now have a much deeper understanding of how that happened.

Thank god for the satellite data. Tho even that can’t save us from continual diddling of the historic pre-1979 record. At this rate, there is going to be a new little ice age in the 1960s by and by so they can keep their trends scary.

Otoh, this may be why we are getting more and more stories of “temporary pause” of 20 years or so in warming. . .they must be starting to realize they can only diddle the back numbers so far, and then must do some log-rolling and hope that warming starts up again.

Altough I have found this program outstanding, I have to admit that the statements made by E.M Smith and d’Aleo regarding the accuracy of the global surface temperature record were obviously wrong. The reduction in the number of temperature measuring sites could have a significant effect on the most recently observed global trends, but not because of changes in spatial distribution. The mentioned temperature series are based on anomalies and not on absolute temperatures. So the dropout of stations sited in cold places have nothing to do with the estimated monthly anomalies, altough this event should produce a significant increase in uncertainty levels due to more limited coverage and therefore larger sampling errors.

In our case, the real culprit is the exact percentage of sites classified as ‘rural’, ‘semi-urban’ and ‘urban’ stations. A couple of posts before Jeff Id pointed out that the GHCN raw station data is contaminated by the well-known but always belittled UHI effect. On a global scale, urban stations have shown almost 3 times more increase in annual mean temperatures than the rural sites in the last 30 years. These findings confirmed my earlier suspicions. After 1990 the percentage of stations which are located in cities or airports have been increased dramatically. The effects of this change may not have been negligible, even Tom Wigley admitted it privately in one of his emails to PD Jones:

We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.

So true, urban warming is really-really important in order to get the pronounced 0.7-0.8°c warming in 150 years. PD Jones of CRU relied on the following argument in his UHI assessment paper in 1990 (available here):

…in any gridded temperature data set, a single affected station is unlikely to have a large influence on the time series of the nearest grid point, because this is generally the weighted average of between 5 and 20 station records.

The often cited Jones et al (1990) is a very doubtful paper now bacause of some obvious fabrications regarding the reliability of their rural reference networks, especially the Chinese one. However, the statement cited above received almost no attention, despite the fact that it contains an enormous flaw. The CRUTEM3 and HadCRUT gridded datasets are available in a 5×5 lat/lon. grid, this means that we have 2592 grid boxes globally. The number of GHCN stations with continuously available data is below 1500, see here. A majority of these sites are located in Europe or in the United States, so the coverage on other continents are even smaller than it can be in case of a homogeneous spatial distribution. Even a ‘homogeneous’ case means only an average of 1.9 stations per grid box (if 29 percent of the grid boxes are located over land). In fact, the spatial coverage of landmasses excluding Europe and the USA is far worse than this number – for example the coverage of Siberia is around 0.5 to 0.7 stations per gridcell, lightyears away from the 5 to 20 interval.

Now we can conclude that the argument used by Dr. Jones regarding the reliability of gridded temperature datasets is untrue. Any urban station can have a significant effect on a single gridcell and an increasing percentage of these contaminated sites due to station dropout can alter the observed global temperature anomaly significantly. It could have a very strong effect at the early part of the record, especially before 1900. Numerous observation sites started as small towns or rural locations, and they were encircled by urbanisation in the last 100-150 years. CRU calculates the temperature anomaly wrt. 1961-90, and it is quite obvious that analysis with the UHI-contaminated 1961-90 base perod will produce cooler anomalies in the 19th century, when population and energy consumption in the vicinities of the measurement sites were lower.

rbateman, it shouldn’t be too hard to see if these have been tampered with. Examine the fonts used, especially those before 1980-82 when computer-based fonts became the norm. Even if there are courier fonts used, it’s easy to spot those made by a typewriter (remember those?) and by a PC

C) The only data NCDC used in the cited paper was for U.S. Those data are no longer available having undergone continued update and analysis, such as addition of data or metadata. The earliest digital version of the HCN data is the 1996 release which is update continuously and available at: ftp://ftp.ncdc .noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/urban mt:an fahr.Z. There are microfiche available that contain data plots of all stations in ORNLlCDIAC-30, NDP-019/Rl, 1990, “United States Historical Climatology Network (HCN) Serial Temperature and Precipitation Data” by T.R. Karl, C.N. Williams Jr., F.T. Quinlan and T.A. Boden, Environmental Sciences Division Publication No. 3404. Hardcopy (paper) of these fiche can be provided at a cost of $596.00.

Am I reading that right? These morons are continually modifying raw data and not keeping archival copies of the data before modification?

I think I am going to go bang my head on a wall for a while!
It takes effort to be that stupid!

-=NikFromNYC=- (23:24:47) : Global averages are presented as anomalies, meaning variations above/below an arbitrary time period’s average. If this was done for the input data too, then only the difference in variability of cold vs. hot regions would be modified by the great dying out of thermometers, not the absolute temperatures.

Aye, now there’s the rub… It is NOT done for the input data. The anomaly map is calculated in the final land data step of GIStemp: STEP3. All the homgenizing, UHI adjustment, etc. are all done on “the monthly average of daily min/max averages”. Only at the very end is the Anomaly Map made.

There are a few points along the way in GIStemp where sets of averages of averages are calculated, and then offsets between these are used for some part; and technically you could call those “anomalies”, but they are not at all what folks think of when they think of anomalies. (For example, there is a UHI adjustment calculated in STEP2 in the PApars.f program. It does this by sprialing out (up to 1000 km) looking for stations to use. It adds up (about 10) of these and uses there (sort of a mean) as the comparision to the station to decide how much to adjust that station for UHI.

Yes, it is TECHNICALLY an anomaly calculation. But then the average of that (semi-random) set of “nearby rural” stations (up to 1000 km away and including major airports and cities with significant UHI) is thrown away and only the station data (now suitably adjusted) moves forward.

You see this all the way through GIStemp. Some average is used to adjust the station data average, then only the station data proceed. I would call these “offsets” rather than anomalies (and the code calls them offsets internally). Finally in STEP3, the Anomaly Map is made and “Ta Dah!!” it is “all anomalies so it’s perfect” is the mantra…

Well, one small problem. If there are insufficient “nearby rural” stations, the data is passed through unchanged. No UHI adjustent is done. So delete the rural stations in the present part of the data set, you get induced warming via no UHI correction. A very large percentage of “rural” stations now are at major airports (such as the largest Marine Base: Quantico Virgina). Any guess how warm it is on the Quantico airstrip right now with all the flights to Haiti? Delete the “real rural” airports, more of the UHI correction goes “the wrong way”, more induced artifical “warming”. All of this BEFORE the Anomaly step of STEP3.

I could go on with many other examples of how this works, but then I’d be retyping my whole blog. Just think on this: NOAA have announced that 100% of the pacific ocean basin will be from AIRPORTS in the near future (it is almost that now). A station on an island can “fill in” grid boxes up to 1200 km out to sea. So one hot station on, oh, Diego Garcia where we built a giant air base that is “rural” can, and does, warm a 2400 km diameter circle of cool ocean via “fill in”… and there being no “nearby rural” station to compare with, will get NO UHI correction. Think those islands airports changed much between the start of 1950 and the advent of the Jet Age Tourist boom in the 1980’s?

But that’s OK, the magical “anomaly” will fix it all up in STEP3 when we compare Diego Carcia today with what it was in 1950 …
There are three non-satellite global averages, GISS, Hadley and NCDC so there are three software packages to ask this question for. Isn’t the whole point of anomalies that using them instead of absolute temperature removes the problem that Smith is making a case for?

I can only speak to the process done inside GIStemp, but the fact that it has close agreement with NCDC and HadCRUT leads me to believe they are similar. Further, inside GIStemp the “dataset format” is called NCAR (As in NOAA NCDC North Carolina…) during the early steps then swaps to a HadCRUT compatible one for STEP4_5 where the Hadley Sea Surface Anomalies are blended in. This says that these folks share data formats (and thus at least the code to read and handle them). They also all work from the same set of “peer” reviewed literature, so will share methods from there as well. I’d love to take a team of programmers through all three and show how much they match, but there is only me and only one set of published code (GIStemp). NCDC is mum, and the UEA leak while helpful is not the whole code base.

Please forgive the length of this, but the “Anomaly” is a frequently used dodge by the AGW believers, and you can not get them to look at what really happens in the code… and it sounds so good… but it is just a “honey pot” to distract you from the real process being done to the data.

It puts a small 3 colour animation in your toolbar which rotates when it finds something. Click on the arrow beside it, and you get a list of content. These clips were all entitled “movie**********mp4″ .

“My concern is that it is too easy to show the flaws in the piece and thereby dismiss more scientifically and rigorously constructed arguments. I had the same reaction to the recent Not Evil, Just Wrong.
That said, thanks for providing access to the show. I hope it leads to more detailed discussions.”

I thought it was too much like crude propaganda.

However, like it or not this is largely an economic and political question and the science is something of a sideshow; at any rate, debunking the bad science, on which far reaching and damaging policies are being based, does not necessarily mean that sensible policies will follow. The important consequences are political and economic and given the head of steam the political establishments have for AGW based policies, the only thing that will cause a change of course is large numbers of voters demanding they be changed, or no vote.

Consider the propaganda about the Hockey Stick, drowning polar bears, melting glaciers on Kilimanjaro, and the warmest everything since records began. None of these errors is ever admitted, they either quietly drop the line or blatantly push it, despite the evidence to the contrary.

Compare it with other political programs discussing defence, health provision, the economy, or whatever, and it becomes a model of rigorous analysis. I think it was pitched at the right level. I’d give it an A, considering its intended audience and even though some of it made me cringe.

*********************
Bernie (09:36:28) :
tucci:
As I noted there are certainly plenty of “pathologies” visible in the CRU emails. Moreover, if your point is that the whole global temperature record is somewhat bizarre, I do not disagree. However, the point at issue is the effectiveness of this particular presentation. Most of the claims will be readily dismissed by the scientific establishment.
******************
Bernie: Did you notice there were scientists in the video who disagreed with the non-consensus. Just because they don’t go along with the hockey team does not mean they are not part of “the establishment.” They are and they are doing what all scientists are supposed to do, they are being skeptical!

bud dingler (23:48:47) :
i thought it was a poor quality reporting (or reading from the prompter) and could not finish watching it. came off a like a Faux News piece.

There was NO prompter and not even a rehearsal. It was “walk in, mic up, sit down, question and answer, one take.” Don’t know what was done in the edit, though. I suppose the ‘voice overs’ (if any) might have been prompted.

In fact, they started the taping session with live news in the ‘ear bug’ and It sounded like we were going to go live… so I asked the camera / tech guy and he said it was just to give me something to listen to while he set up…

hotrod ( Larry L ) (12:39:16) :
Am I reading that right? These morons are continually modifying raw data and not keeping archival copies of the data before modification?

Yes, you’re correct. They have plausible deniability by simply claiming the manuscript data sources are still in the archive, if anyone wants them bad enough. What they don’t tell you is how inaccessible those manuscripts are while in their custody, or that the insects are reportedly eating at least some of the original manuscript records and their raw data. Oops, it was an accident. Sorry ’bout that. Shoulda paid us more money to take better care of those old wet and musty records no one wants to see anyway.

Are you getting paid to spout this nonsense or does it just come naturally?

Take it easy there J.Peden. Geez, I was making a statement of fact. That is the counter argument! I did not say it was mine. Warmers argue the satellite and surface data are “in good agreement”, thus arguing the surface data being manipulated is irrelevant.

Steve Case (01:05:25) : I simply do not understand the whole issue of reduced number of reporting stations. Certainly there ARE weather stations in Bolivia. Are the data from them not being used? Is this really so? I would like to see more details on this issue.

I see that someone else already put in the “Bolivia” link. My comment: Bolivia is in the baseline, but drops out in 1990 (gee… where have I seen that date before…). Current Boliva “anomalies” are created from Grids / Boxes that have the “temperatures” fiilled -in from “nearby” outside Boliva up to 1200 km away. GIStemp claims that they have magic sauce via the Reference Stations Method to make this all 100% fine. (And I think it does help, it just isn’t perfect). So you end up comparing “Peru at the beach and Amazon Jungle, but adjusted” with “real old and cold Bolivia”. It is the assertion that this can be done with fractional degree of C accuracy out of this whole mess that is where they go off the rails, IMHO.

Phil. (05:24:33) :

magicjava (04:10:38) :
As an example, if they are taking the anomalies from L.A. and using it for all of California (which is basically what they’re doing) but only adjusting for UHI in L.A., then you’ll get higher anomalies than you should get throughout nearly all of California.

Is this what’s actually going on? I don’t know. We’d need to see the source code for how these adjustments are done.

Go ahead then. no one’s stopping you, let us know what you find out.

The source code is up, you can find it at NASA or through my site. The GIStemp tab has a “Geek Corner” toward the bottom with links to source code, data, et. al. I also have an older version of the source code up as browsable pages.

DR (07:01:58) : The counter argument is the satellite data and surface records tell the same story so it does not matter if the surface data has been manipulated.

That would be fine if it were not for the fact that the manipulation is done in the past before satellite data are available to compare… GIStemp even puts a “knee” in the code about the time satellites come into being. Gee, I wonder why all three of NCDC, UEA / CRU, and GISS all chose to rewrite the past and all chose to leave the satellite era more stable… Just asking…

Tim Clark (08:20:45) :

magicjava (08:05:13) :
Is the source code for these adjustments available online? I’ve only seen model source code.

The source code and very technical analysis stuff is actually in a different category. I’m trying to keep the “code chalk talk” in a different bucket from the “what it means” stuff, but there is a lot of crossover…

Please note that since I got sucked down the rabbit hole of NCDC data changing I’ve let the code review sit. Some of the later stages, like STEP3 and STEP4_5 are basically just the code listings. I really need to add commentary, but “I’ve been busy elsewhere” ;-)

I have to agree with an earlier poster! (Gtrip) This look just like a Jack Van Impe Program. Or like those movies in the 70’s that tried to prove UFOs and such. I am objectively looking at this issue and lean against AGW but this program was a joke in how it was presented.

Well an interesting program, and some nice sleuthing by EM Smith. Good show there mate; didn’t know you were in San Jose.

Another element of the loss of surface measuring stations, is the extent to which stations are selectively placed at known urban heat islands, such as airport runways. Well of course that is for the benefit and safety of flight cres, who really want to know the runway weather to determine safe take off envelopes.

But a further bias, when such stations are selectively used for climate data.

Well I never have believed much of the historic surface data back before 1980, because the data for 70+% of the global surface was taken from water temperatures, and not air temperatures; and those two aren’t correlated; according to John Christy’s Jan 2001 paper in Geophysical Research letters.

[Quote]
George E. Smith (14:48:25) :
[….]
Another element of the loss of surface measuring stations, is the extent to which stations are selectively placed at known urban heat islands, such as airport runways. Well of course that is for the benefit and safety of flight cres, who really want to know the runway weather to determine safe take off envelopes.
[Unquote]

One of the reasons why the HCN (Historical Climate Networks) were created in the first place was to eliminate the non-representative data of the stations in the Airways Network such as the airports having paved runways, taxiways, and other improper influences.

Independent investigators could look at the other datasets originating in other meterological networks to see if any trends can be discerned with and/or without the influences of UHI. Those small airports which still have grass-gravel runways and taxiways supporting small numbers of propeller driven aircraft in relatively rural environments may provide some useful insights in comparisons to the HCN datasets.

This program’s message is quite harmful to the public in the big scheme of things. No, CO2 will not cause the end of the world, but you have to look at this issue from a macro level. All of the things that release CO2 into the air directly harm the environment in other ways. Perhaps when policy makers enact such regulation, they are trying to strengthen America through weining it off of environmentally unsound practices and jump-start the economy and improve living conditions. not a case of big brother trying to get you, it’s a case of government protecting its citizens living now, and those that will inherit this world in generations to come.

What ought to have come out of the screen was “3 Canadian Territories: Yukon, NWT, Nunavut, with one station remaining north of 65 degrees”. But I, in self editing to avoid turning my 20 minutes of raw tape into 5 hours… managed to edit out of my words “north of 65 degrees” thinking it sounded kind of geeky for regular folks TV. In retrospect, an error.

All I can say in my defense is that when you are doing all this from memory, no notes, no teleprompter, no rehearsal, “live to tape”, and you KNOW it’s going to be seen all over the place and some folks are going to get really really cranky at you… well, sometimes you mess up a few words.

Frankly, I was trying to remember if it was 60 degrees or 65 degrees about the time I heard “Nunavut” come out of my mouth and decided I needed to ‘cut’ rather than fumble and mumble over the 5 question… If you’ve never been on camera before, you have no idea what it can be like. If you have been, you know.

And to the folks who said “it must take some courage” or simlar. Yeah. Especially knowing that I was standing up to be counted and that “the other side” likes to machine gun folks who stand up. (Or even just raise their hand to ask a question while still seated ;-)

So you do what you can, try to remember the “rough points” for next time, and hope there will be a next time.

theenvirokid: Do look at the macro level and see what’s really at stake here. CO2 reduction is purely a revenue grab/wealth transfer. Nothing else. And all those other pet projects I’m sure that are dear to your heart (solving malnutrition, mosquito-borne diseases, childhood mortality, providing fresh water etc) for all the under/undeveloped countries all go by the wayside. It is the world’s poor who will pay the highest price for this—all the $$ that should go to humanitarian causes will go to providing solar panels, wind farms etc—and who will never be allowed to develop their countries to raise the standard of living. So, go ahead, look at what’s going on. And afterwards if you still hold your beliefs, well… maybe you need to take a micro look at yourself.

Well I posted links to this video series on another web forum I visit and already two other individuals have picked them up and are passing them on to others.

That sort of geometric growth does not take long to have effect. Like a nuclear chain reaction all you need is for on average each re-posting results in another individual picking up the content at a frequency greater than one to one.

This multiplication factor must be greater than one for the chain reaction to grow.
Even for very small multiplication factors just slightly larger than unity the number grows very large over time. The process of “going viral” on the internet is very similar, if on average every forwarding of a topic to others results in more than one additional forwarding you have continuous gain over time, with the vast majority of the increase happening perhaps 50-60 generations down the line when the number shoots toward infinity. The limiting factor then becomes how long it takes on average for each viewer to pass on the links to others.

Unlike something like Michael Jackson’s death this forwarding time delay will not be seconds or minutes but probably hours. If this video series goes viral we should know in about 2-3 days I would guess.

Ralph (02:11:10) :
‘a. CO2 is the major CAUSE of Global Warming (rather than being a minor augmentation feedback agent).
b. CO2 is being output by the billions of tonnes by industry, and is ‘building up in the atmosphere’. The image is of an atmosphere with 20% CO2 concentration’

Agree: It is playing with peoples perception by talking in terms of CO2 tonnage. The biggest eyebrow raiser is to inform them in terms of percentage i.e. that CO2 is only 0.038% of atmospheric gases and that over 90% of that is natural.

‘ARC is a secular body that helps the major religions of the world to develop their own environmental programmes…We help the religions link with key environmental organisations – creating powerful alliances…’

This program’s message is quite harmful to the public in the big scheme of things. No, CO2 will not cause the end of the world, but you have to look at this issue from a macro level. All of the things that release CO2 into the air directly harm the environment in other ways. Perhaps when policy makers enact such regulation, they are trying to strengthen America through weining it off of environmentally unsound practices and jump-start the economy and improve living conditions. not a case of big brother trying to get you, it’s a case of government protecting its citizens living now, and those that will inherit this world in generations to come.

The vast bulk of “things that release CO2 into the air” have their natural world equivalents which release most of the same potentially toxic byproducts and much worse. If anything, humanity is reducing many of those toxic releases related to oxidation and carbon dioxide well below many of their natural world equivalents occuring in the absence of human intervention.

In the absence of humans, the world environment was polluted with all manner of toxic substances resulting from natural releases of petroleum, natural gas, forest fires, prarie fires, mineral leaching, and much much more. The Earth’s atmosphere has normally contained 5 to 20 times or more than current levels of carbon dioxide with great beneficial effects to life on this planet. Current levels of carbon dioxide are among only a few occasions in which the planet has suffered such extraordinarily low levels of the trace gas for the past 550 million years in which multicellular life has existed on this planet. If anything, the Earth’s biosphere is suffering a strong deficiency in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the environment would greatly benefit by its increase to more normal levels relative to the past 550 million years. Unfortunately, humans lack the capability of making any substantial changes to increase or decrease the atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The total carbon dioxide resident in the world reserves of fossil fuels are insufficient to substantially increase atmospheric dioxide, and would be quickly sequestered into the biosphere and lithosphere by natural effects and the biosphere in a very short period of time, even if it were possible to oxidize them all in only one year or one day. A major asteroid strike into a carbonate sea floor causes greater releases of carbon dioxide, and the Earth’s geological record of such past events can scarcely even detect the event by its contribution of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Attempts by communists, socialists, and other utopians who subscribe to the false faith that a dictatorial elite are somehow going to provide universal control and guide the rest of humanity into a utopian world with a one world “government protecting its citizens living now, and those that will inherit this world in generations to come” demonstrates a profound ignorance of reality and contempt for the awesome and impetuous forces of a chaotic physical Universe. Proof of the failure of such schemes can be found in the former Soviet Union and East European communist governments, where the colossal environmental damage from such utopian experiments still haunt the survivors.

By contrast, it is the energy rich nations which have always accomplished more to reduce environmental damage using the wealth created by that energy usage. Reduced energy usage results in poverty and profound environmental damage. Counseling ruinous and unnecessary restrictions upon usage of fossil fuels is suicidal for hundreds of millions of people around the world, and it guarantees widespread destruction of the environment well beyond anything yet witnessed by mankind. So it is the perpetuation of the utopian myth of central governement control of humanity’s activities and usage of energy which directly and indirectly threatens immediate global destruction of human lives and environment.

It is not true, he has no idea what he is talking about. He has something wrong with his computer. When he said his computer crashed, he needs to be explicit, computers can crash from previous infections and all manner of hardware issues and software depending on his OS.

The only thing you need to view the videos is an updated web brower (IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari ect…) and Adobe Flash Player installed, currently at version 10.0.42.34. It has nothing to do with Acrobat Reader 9 or Sun’s Java. Javascript and Java are two different things and you do not need either enabled to watch the videos on the KUSI website, you do need Javascript enabled to watch anything on YouTube. Whether you need Javascript enabled to watch a flash based video depends on how the page was programmed, you should just leave it enabled since many pages use it for various things like menus and it is by default in all major browsers.

Most problems with Firefox stems from too many add-ons that cause conflicts (unsinstall all of them and try again), useless tweak programs and user “customizations” (only real solution is to uninstall and reinstall the browser – do not apply tweaks).

Always try another browser if you cannot get something to work in one, if you are using Firefox, try IE or visa-versa. That way you can isolate the problem. I do not believe KUSI is implementing region restrictions like the BBC does.

Anyway the videos worked fine in every browser I tried (IE, FIrefox, Opera and Safari).

Boballab
Could you not download the page, print it out and then apply an OCR to it?

When you start out from the page you have to select the state from a menu, then from that you get a menu of all the stations fro that state, you select one and from that it takes you to another menu that runs by year and month. So for the year 2008 and for State College PA, there is 12 different links and you have to select each one. From there it searchs their database and gives you a link to the page which is this:

Now here is the kicker: For just this one station that goes back to 1893 that means pulling up roughly 1,392 pages (if no months/years missed on the record). So I can’t see putting out the cost of the ink/paper to print out almost 1,400 pages, then spend the time to scan it back in just for 3 readings per page.

Also some of the PDF’s do not have good scans of them and the stuff is very faint, here is and example of that:

(description of product)
“These CD-ROMs contain ASCII data files and associated station history files for the Cooperative Summary of the Day (DS3200) data set. Recently updated through 2006, this data set is a compilation of daily observations from more than 20,000 cooperative weather stations in the United States, U.S. Caribbean Islands, U.S. Pacific Islands, and Puerto Rico. It includes air and soil temperatures, rainfall, snowfall, and evaporation elements. A map interface is available on the Eastern, Central and Western Disks. The period of record on these disks vary among stations but falls within the period from the 1850s through 2001. The Update Disk contains compressed files for 2002-2006 and also includes DS 3210 data which comprises just the “first-order” National Weather Service sites (the same stations are also in DS 3200), but also includes some additional data elements that are not reported by Cooperative stations. The files are in the raw, archive format without any software for conversion to a spreadsheet ready format.”

Does anyone else ever ask their global warming alarmist friends why every global warming solution happens to be some leftist policy (more taxes, more regulations, less personal freedom etc) that liberals would want to enact with out without global warming? Want to hear me and my lefty friend have a good old fashioned global warming throwdown? http://www.chrisandshane.com

Yes Coleman said 5 scientists but he never said Ph.D. that was on the title image which is incorrect as Lord Monckton does not have a Ph.D. but he did introduce him correctly as the science adviser to M. Thatcher. This was not the only error I noticed in the videos but I am not going to get into them here.

Monckton however does get his information correct and has a better grasp of the issues then the politicians making policy decisions on it. He is hardly a liability, he has an incredible memory and fantastic speaking ability to communicate things down to the layman. Unlike Gore, Lord Monckton is a mathematical genius which is why he is much more formidable as a skeptic then you realize. Do not underestimate him, write him off or hold him accountable for something he never stated.

E. M. Smith, I’m glad my question about anomalies got so much attention above, especially your own. I remain confused, but not in a simple sense of wondering if there is a glaringly obvious hole in your argument revolving around the use of anomalies (absolute temperature values converted to variations from an average value).

It’s frustrating for non-programmers to have to rely on the often non-summarized work of a mere handful of people who have taken the time to do serious work on these issues. Your blog tends to plot long columns of number instead of present graphs, so summaries are indeed sorely needed (!). I’m not convinced that GISTEMP is garbage…far from it…nor do I even suspect it yet, but the severe drop-out of surface stations that coincides with a huge increase in climate research funding seems *rather* odd indeed, and I now see this as a serious issue that must be FULLY addressed in any validation of GISTEMP. Garbage-in / garbage-out. Hopefully this issue will get enough press to force those responsible to release a statement about it, even though claiming that satellite data now makes surface measurements obsolete would make me want to bang my head against a wall, for instance.

There seems to be a classic generation gap at work. The FOIA e-mails of Jim Hansen’s group, here at Columbia, where I reside, indicates that Hansen has somewhat justifiably gone into “conclusion mode” very much in opposition to those who are younger in spirit who prefer to creatively question what, really, are the best methods to create a global average temperature that has useful meaning. Hansen is a noteworthy pioneer, who for whatever reason, no longer has a Feynman-like fascination about how NASA might improve its product line. Being NASA, one must sincerely wonder if their Global Warming product is due to Canadian data being in Celsius, but they forgot to convert it to Fahrenheit (or if anybody bothered to check if rubber o-rings could handle cold caused by cryogenic liquid rocket fuel). Aging NASA folk who think they can rest on their laurels need to understand that a speck of paint on a perfect instrument can blind the entire Hubble telescope. Another example of literal GARBAGE IN = GARBAGE OUT.

I have already told Monckton what I think of him. His lectures are good, but the oppositiion see him as a gift. So do I.

Poptech

Monckton was not a science adviser, he had some extreme right wing ideas which appealed to Thacher and became a minor economic adviser in the number 10 policy unit. His accusation of a proposed communist world government following Copenhagen is insane, I see no left wing politics in the developed world. Monbiot ripped him up in the Guardian for that.

You don’t know whether Monckton is correct, any more than you know whether Hansen is correct. I actually agree with everything he says, and he presents the information extremely well, but he is a very loose cannon who actually admits to lying. That is inherited, aristocratic arrogance and he has lots of that.

Sean Peake

I can handle Monckton. He sent me a mad email and I told him, he was playing up to the right wing Americans on the lecture circuit for money (and laughing at them).

I stopped watching when he lied about Monckton being a scientist, lied that he had a phd and lied that he had been a science advisor to the British government.

Monckton is an eccentric, right wing clown who has the money not to have to worry what anyone thinks of him. In my opinion, he is a liability to the anti AGW cause.
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You appear to be a hack, Eric Smith.

From: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/personnel.html
Lord Monckton, UK: — Christopher, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, was Special Advisor to Margaret Thatcher as UK Prime Minister from 1982 to 1986, and gave policy advice on technical issues such as warship hydrodynamics (his work led to his appointment as the youngest Trustee of the Hales Trophy for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic), psephological modeling (predicting the result of the 1983 General Election to within one seat), embryological research, hydrogeology (leading to the award of major financial assistance to a Commonwealth country for the construction of a very successful hydroelectric scheme), public-service investment analysis (leading to savings of tens of billions of pounds), public welfare modeling (his model of the UK tax and benefit system was, at the time, more detailed than the Treasury’s economic model, and led to a major simplification of the housing benefit system), and epidemiological analysis. On leaving 10 Downing Street, he established a successful specialist consultancy company, giving technical advice to corporations and governments. His two articles in the Sunday Telegraph late in 2006 debunking the climate-change “consensus” received more hits to the newspaper’s website than any other in the paper’s history: the volume of hits caused the link to crash. His contribution to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 – the correction of a table inserted by IPCC bureaucrats that had overstated tenfold the observed contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise – earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate. His Nobel prize pin, made of gold recovered from a physics experiment, was presented to him by the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester, New York, USA. He has lectured at university physics departments on the quantification of climate sensitivity, on which he is widely recognized as an expert, and his limpid analysis of the climate-feedback factor was published on the famous climate blog of Roger Pielke, Sr. His lecture to undergraduates at the Cambridge Union Society on climate change has been released by SPPI as Apocalypse? NO!, a full-length feature movie on high-definition DVD (available from http://www.greatswindle.com). Apocalypse? NO! been described by Professor Larry Gould of the University of Hartford, Connecticut, “as one of the best films ever made…”

This program’s message is quite harmful to the public in the big scheme of things. No, CO2 will not cause the end of the world, but you have to look at this issue from a macro level. All of the things that release CO2 into the air directly harm the environment in other ways. Perhaps when policy makers enact such regulation, they are trying to strengthen America through weining it off of environmentally unsound practices and jump-start the economy and improve living conditions. not a case of big brother trying to get you, it’s a case of government protecting its citizens living now, and those that will inherit this world in generations to come.
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I’m getting REALLY TIRED of hearing leftists claim all these socialist programs will create jobs. It is a lie. It will divert money from productive uses to non-efficient uses of labor, energy, and materials. The government does not have the ability to run the economy – no one group of people is that smart (especially the group in power now.)

“…Lord Monckton does not have a Ph.D. but he did introduce him correctly as the science adviser to M. Thatcher. This was not the only error I noticed in the videos but I am not going to get into them here.

“Monckton however does get his information correct and has a better grasp of the issues then the politicians making policy decisions on it. He is hardly a liability, he has an incredible memory and fantastic speaking ability to communicate things down to the layman. Unlike Gore, Lord Monckton is a mathematical genius which is why he is much more formidable as a skeptic then you realize. Do not underestimate him, write him off or hold him accountable for something he never stated.”

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Eric Smith falls into the logical fallacy of argument from authority as well as argumentum ad hominem in his attack on Mr. Monckton. Smith presses the value of credentialing – having one’s “union ticket” as it were – in the form of a graduate degree, as if compliance with the qualifications process of an accredited academic institution were either necessary for someone’s opinions to be taken seriously or had some value as utterly reliable validation for the degree’d individual’s opinions on a subject within that degree’s discipline.

In addition to being a statist* (of the coloration currently popular among America’s ascendant socialist cabal), Eric Smith is decidedly not literate in the sciences.

Were that the case, he would understand that the source of an idea or argument – the person articulating a concept – is irrelevant. It might as well be wholly anonymous. The notion itself must be considered on the basis of its intrinsic validity.

The question, therefore, isn’t Mr. Monckton’s background, his curriculum vitae, his political or pecuniary motivations, or anything else. Instead, what Eric Smith must address are Mr. Monckton’s arguments, the information he predicates those arguments upon, and whether or not that information and the arguments developed thereupon are valid.

This Eric Smith has failed even to attempt, much less accomplish.

To be a statist – a socialist, a fascist, a “Liberal,” a progressive, whatever they’re calling themselves this week – one must necessarily disable one’s reasoning ability. Human beings are not hive-dwelling insects or wool-bearing domestic animals but autonomously functioning individual creatures who are not only capable of reasoned thought but necessarily survive through the exercise of that reasoning function.

Thus we have developed the conceptual tool of individual rights, negative rights to life, to liberty, and to property, in order to permit human beings to live in each other’s company, and to facilitate the division-of-labor economy that so important for the material prosperity of reasoning creatures. In these United States we have deliberately structured civil government for the explicit purpose of protecting those rights.

Statism necessarily involves the systematic violation of individual rights, and Eric Smith is therefore inescapably a person who publicly advocates violence against his fellow human beings. No getting around it, I’m afraid.

This is in itself quite irrational, of course. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Eric Smith should stumble haplessly into errors of logic every time he posts, and that the implacable logic and skeptical integrity of the scientific method should be utterly beyond his grasp.

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* “The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man’s life and work belong to the state — to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation — and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.” (Alisa Rosenbaum O’Connor, 1962)

The nobel peace prize is a pathetic Monckton fantasy, and the rest are probably fantasies too.

Tucci

Monckton seems to have a number of honours fom the Roman Catholic church, not the most freedom loving or democratic organisation in human history. Your ‘philosophy’ is uniquely American, a country controlled by its own security services (CIA) and phony right and left think tanks. All controlled by the mega rich. Stanley Monteith reoported that one of McCarthy’s sub committees discovered that the communist party of America was funded by big business. I suspect I know vastly more about right wing politics than you do.

Monckton actually said at his Minnesota lecture (paraphrase) “the reason you believed this nonsense is that you are yanks”. Then pretended it was a joke. It wasn’t. That is one of the things I pulled him up on.

In my view, all that is happening is that the left support AGW because they think it will control capitalism, which is a lie, the right oppose it because they think it is socialism, which is a lie. The two biggest ‘left wing’ newspapers in the UK, the Guardian (including Monbiot) and Independent were sponsored by Shell Oil to promote global warming. Monbiot’s family are very prominent right wing politicians by the way.

The truth is that Enron and BP created carbon trading at Kyoto and the IETA was the biggest pro agw group at Copenhagen. It represents the fossil fuel industries and the banks. The reason is free carbon credits for giant corporations.

I looked at the Giss data and discovered 34 references to Canada using the “find word” function. Searching the total list, however, found 510 stations being used. The descriptions of province and counrty are less than helpful so I may have, due to geographic challenges, have missed some.

So, what am I doing wrong. The list of stations actually being used is much longer than described above?

You lost me on your comic book fantasies about America controlled by the CIA and big business funding communists. I thought you actually wanted a serious discussion, instead it devolved into conspiracy fantasies.

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Eric Smith (11:32:26) :
Stanley Monteith reoported that one of McCarthy’s sub committees discovered that the communist party of America was funded by big business. I suspect I know vastly more about right wing politics than you do.
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Well, you are correct in that a lot of big corporations have jumped on the green bandwagon – I don’t appreciate it either, but their charge is to make money, so they go along to get along – kind of distasteful.

But it is too funny you bring up McCarthy. When I look at the commie/socialists in Barry’s world, I wish McCarthy had been more successful because he had it figured out!!

As if increasing the dosage of logical fallacy will somehow improve the quality of his bootless vituperation, Eric Smith again spouts argumentum ad hominem with regard to Christopher Monckton (failing to address the substance of Mr. Monckton’s arguments), even apparently attempting to imply that because Mr. Monckton has won some favor with Holy Mother Church that he’s part of some sort of papist pederastic plotting or other.

Eric Smith goes on to write:

“In my view, all that is happening is that the left support AGW because they think it will control capitalism, which is a lie, the right oppose it because they think it is socialism, which is a lie.”

It’s hard to claim that any opinion broadly held (by either those on the right or those on the left of the rather duplicitous political spectrum) is “a lie.” It may be wrong or it may be right, but whether the person professing such an opinion is lying cannot be decided merely by reading yet another opinion (that of Eric Smith) which is advanced without a shred of support.

Capitalism (formerly called “the free market,” and the phrase still fits) is merely the macroeconomic manifestation of individual rights in a division-of-labor society, and as such is a facilitating and harmonizing system of organization whereby consenting human beings exchange value for value according to their considered desires and abilities.

Socialism, on the other hand, has nothing to do with consent. Opposition to socialism is therefore an honorable and praiseworthy position, and I would think more of “the right” if most of the politicians on “the right” were not thoroughgoing grafters, religious whackjobs, racists, and bedroom-peeping bluenoses.

Not surprisingly – for political effort is tiresome and full of troubles, and loathesome motivations are not the exclusive prerogative of people like Eric Smith – the pundits and professional politicians on “the right” are for the greatest part the kinds of people you would not leave alone in your living room and expect to come back and find your dog un-raped.

What we call “the mixed economy” is effectively made up of reasoning human beings striving to survive in spite of Eric Smith’s type of authoritarian dirigisme, and the extent to which the people who suffer under Eric Smith’s ideal form of predatory and strangling civil government can evade those depredations and impairments determines to what extent the quality of life for the average citizen can be improved.

The issue lies not between Eric Smith’s “left” and “right” (both of which exhibit authoritarian characteristics), but rather between authoritarianism and individual liberty.

Being rational and recognizing that the reasoning nature of the human being is the essential characteristic by which he must live (indeed, without which he cannot even survive), I favor individual liberty.

Eric Smith – and I can only infer his motives – is obviously an authoritarian.

This is thoroughly illogical, malevolent, and conducive to breach of the public peace and the destruction of civil order, and therefore Eric Smith must be considered a public nuisance at the very least.

To the extent that he undertakes political action on the basis of the positions he has articulated here, he is an enemy of the people in general, and must be treated as such.
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To all aspiring politicos on this site:
Don’t you think that if tax-payer funding (via government) of these NGOs was cut completely and they were stripped of their dubious charitable status that the political situation would be alot clearer ?

“Some people need to be doing some serious jail time after these revelations.”

Appropriate though it would be to see Dr. Hanson, Dr. Schmidt, Dr. Mann, Mr. Gore, and all the other participants in the AGW fraud sent to prison for the rest of their natural lives, the problem with criminal prosecution is proving criminal intention – mens rea – in each case.

Multiple crimes have undoubtedly been committed. If nothing else, falsely applying for federal research grants and agencies’ operating budgets is fraught with criminal penalties. The difficulty is in proving that Dr. Mann (for example) knowingly lied in the application by which he got his latest $541,000 out of the “stimulus” funds to further pursue his AGW propagandizing.

While these people are definitely too stupid to be given e-mail accounts, they know how to cover their butts in grant applications.

It may be best to hit them with civil lawsuits undertaken to seek material and punitive damages from them instead. Rules of evidence are not anywhere near as restrictive, and there are literally millions of people in America alone who have been substantially injured as the result of the professional incompetence and the dereliction of duty with regard to professional ethics demonstrated by the CRU correspondents and the warmist bureaucrats in NASA and NOAA.

These should be quite actionable, and should be pursued vigorously.

Mr. Gore in particular has been flaunting the proverbial “deep pockets” that mark an individual for the special attention of the ATLA membership, and I have no doubt that he has come into focus for many folks in the plaintiff’s bar since 17 November.

Court calendars all over America are going to be very interesting reading over the next couple of years, I think. Particularly in areas where jury selection will likely engage large numbers of citizens available for such service as the result of unemployment.

I divided the stations into those which are live in the data at some point from 2005 onwards compared to all the others. See graph at http://crapstats.wordpress.com/

I hope WUTW can post an update about what has been previously said about why this happens – there must be a lot in the public domain – surely this cant be new news but I can’t find it and an authoritative list of resources would be much appreciated.

To all aspiring politicos on this site:
Don’t you think that if tax-payer funding (via government) of these NGOs was cut completely and they were stripped of their dubious charitable status that the political situation would be alot clearer ?
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I am for the government to quit funding all NGOs (an anything that remotely resembles them) and also all scientific research. The only way funding of science would be acceptable to me is if the money were divvied up per head (per researcher heads in a university) irrespective of the research in question. In other words, without bias on the part of the government. The government could still fund defense research – one of its Constitutional powers being defense. This would conserve money in the US (we are a debtor nation and getting poorer by the day).

You lost me on your comic book fantasies about America controlled by the CIA and big business funding communists. I thought you actually wanted a serious discussion, instead it devolved into conspiracy fantasies.

Setting aside Eric Smith’s comments, what makes you think big business IS NOT funding communists, including the AGW/CAGW Alarmists, and such funding is nothing more than “comic book fantasies and conspiracy fantasies? Are you claiming none of the AGW/CAGW Alarmist leadership is knowingly participating in a conspiracy, or that conspiracies to control U.S. Government policies, including Global Warming or Climate Change, do not or cannot exist?

“…what makes you think big business IS NOT funding communists, including the AGW/CAGW Alarmists, and such funding is nothing more than ‘comic book fantasies’ and conspiracy fantasies? Are you claiming none of the AGW/CAGW Alarmist leadership is knowingly participating in a conspiracy, or that conspiracies to control U.S. Government policies, including Global Warming or Climate Change, do not or cannot exist?”

It may well be that Eric Smith is freelancing here along the lines recommended by Barry Soetoro’s advisor Cass Sunstein in his paper “Conspiracy Theories,”: published on 15 January 2008. Think of Eric Smith’s postings as “cognitive infiltration” of the type advocated by Mr. Sunstein and Mr. Vermeule in that rather astonishingly fascist publication.

Clumsy “cognitive infiltration,” but nonetheless an effort to cast specious doubts within an online forum where the majority of participants are quite receptive to the well-reasoned consideration of malfeasance on the part of the warmist CRU correspondents and AGW-pushing federal government employees at NASA and the NCDC.

It must be understood that people like Eric Smith – and Cass Sunstein – who wish to hold political power over their neighbors are by definition psychopathologically dysfunctional, and either proximally or distally a danger to other people.

They presume definitively and without question or qualm to know what is good for their fellow human beings, how those “sheeple” should be herded, husbanded, shorn, and slaughtered. They do not value the dignity and worth of the individual H. sapiens at all, and consider themselves somehow intellectually and morally superior to the “lesser folk,” the little people, the contemptible mob.

That emphatically includes us “global warming skeptics.” You know. Us “deniers.”

Setting aside the illogic and the insanity of people like Eric Smith and Cass Sunstein (and their beloved Barry Soetoro), how does the naked viciousness of their attitude make you feel, hm?

I don’t know about you, reader, but I’m afraid I’ve got this wholly Sicilian urge to convey Eric Smith and Cass Sunstein to someplace where the water is deep enough, and see how long it takes for the bubbles to stop coming up.

I’ll try to deal with that urge, but I can’t promise restraint on the part of my fellow “lesser folk.”

You’re mistaken. The questions were directed to Poptech, who is denying “big business is funding communists.” I’m setting aside Eric Smith’s comments to ask Poptech what makes him think some big business IS NOT funding communists (not to mention communist support of AGW activism and alarmism).

Tucci, renting the boat is too expensive. The ideal, and perhaps most ironic, costs about $2. Simply pour the contents of a can of oil-packed tuna on the heads of the two miscreants and drop them on the shore of Hudson Bay somewhere north of Churchill. Having had direct encounters with the creature that is at the top of the food chain in the north, it will take polar bears (DEFINITELY plural) about an hour to pick up the scent. It’s akin to ringing the dinner bell. And nary a trace would remain

Prove big business is funding communists, it is illogical for one and not substantiated for two.

Gad. How many times have we been over GE/Shell/BP/etc funding AGW and particularly government control efforts related to it in an attempt to gain favor with the bureaucrats and gain advantage for themselves?

The problem with internet debates is not that they never end, it’s that they’re the same EVERY DAY.

Between the megacorps and government grants, warmists are funded to many, many times the level of the skeptics. That’s been documented here repeatedly, and I’d go grab all those links and make a huge link farm, except that I know there will be a short pause and then the demand for proof will be made again as if it had never been provided.

Prove big business is funding communists, it is illogical for one and not substantiated for two.

Climategate has shown a coordinated effort between activist scientists who are associated with RealClimate, NASA GISS and CRU and environmental groups like greenpeace to push an alarmist agenda.

I am claiming that eric’s statement is conspiracy fantasies. Can you not read what I wrote?

It was because I could read and understand what you wrote that I was affording you an opportunity to explain why you choose to think any statement claiming “big business is funding communists” can only be a comic book fantasy.

You say it is illogical for big business to fund communism, yet you fail to recognize that big business is sometimes owned and operated by illogical people who illogically believe in socialism and communism.

You say it is unsubstnatiated for big business to fund communism, yet I cannot see any evidence you have investigated and refuted the public sources which show funding by corporations and corporate charities to so-called Leftist charities supported and staffed at least in part by communists, coummunist sympathizers, and Marxist socialists.

For example, are you implying the membership and/or leadership of Greenpeace does not include any overt or covert communists and big business does not fund Greenpeace?

NikFromNYC (01:19:29) : Your blog tends to plot long columns of number instead of present graphs, so summaries are indeed sorely needed (!).

Sorry. But:

a) I have the ability to see what numbers say and see the patterns in large blocks of numbers. They work fine for me, and for many others.

b) Presenting the numbers lets anyone else do whatever they want with them, including graphs. Most folks could not get the GIStemp code running nor get the “blocks of numbers” to work with. I took on THAT chunk of this near infinite problem as it was stopping up so many other folks efforts.

c) I do not “do” graphics well. I have at best a crude level of skill at it. Further, I’m running on boxes the newest of which is 10 years old. That is, the sofware is crappy too. Now I’d love to run out and buy a new Mac with all the latest eye candy toys on it. You gonna give me the money? ( I presently have no job. I’m “making ends meet” trading stock in my retirement account, but it isn’t easy and I’m NOT rich. Yet ;-) It is also the case that, despite all the trolls saying things are funded by oil companies, I see them giving support to the AGW side. I’ve not had a single penny of income from this. So everything I’ve done is all volunteer. I get to make choices like: “new computer for graphs, or pay car insurance?” Decisions decisions… )

d) There has been time pressure to make this happen fast. (i.e. Copenhagen et. al.) So I had to choose. 1) Spend 6 months to a year getting better hardware and software and learning to make pretty pictures and miss the window of opportunity. or… 2) Run with what I’ve got, do the best with it that I can. Let other folks make graphs if they want (they have the data). I chose #2. And I think the results show it was the right choice.

I’m not convinced that GISTEMP is garbage…far from it…

Nor do I think it is “garbage”. It, IMHO, has issues. Lots of them. But they are relatively modest (mostly UHI and some homogenization). It does, to some extent, do what it claims to do. The realization of that, and the discovery that it was NOAA / NCDC via the data “adjustments” that was “the big fish” is why I’ve basically not had a GIStemp posting for the last couple of months. (Don’t worry, I’ll get back to it ;-)

What I’m fairly certain of, beyond doubt, is that there is an INTERACTION between the NOAA / NCDC data changes done in GHCN and USHCN and the operation of GIStemp. I can not speak to motivation, but it sure looks to me like each delivers half a dose of poison so neither can be accused of killing the truth. NCDC GHCN drops cold thermometers and says “The Anomaly will fix it”. GISS says “we are not responsible for the data”; then has processing that is sensitive to thermometer deletions in cold places in times more recent than the baseline. But points to a “peer reviewed” paper saying anomalies fix things in a hypothetical way. Well, I’m not interested in a hypothetical cow, I’m interested in where is the beef in this specific pile of Bull.

John McManus (14:41:01) : I looked at the Giss data and discovered 34 references to Canada using the “find word” function. Searching the total list, however, found 510 stations being used. […]

So, what am I doing wrong. The list of stations actually being used is much longer than described above?

The “shell game” is this: YES all those stations are used. IN THE PAST.

Then the cold ones are taken out and shot about 1990 leaving the warm ones in for CURRENT data. So you end up comparing LIMITED WARM CURRENT stations to MANY OLD COLD stations. But, hey, they are all “used” in GHCN ;-)

Sean Peake advises that “renting the boat is too expensive” and enjoins that when it comes to dealing with Cass Sunstein, Eric Smith, and their ilk, it is better to “drop them on the shore of Hudson Bay somewhere north of Churchill,” scented to draw the attention of Ursus maritimus.

While the poetry of this solution is not disputed, the expenses associated with such an expedition considerably exceed the cost of signing out a boat. Besides, there are plenty of docks all along the eastern seaboard. Also bridges, barges tied up at quayside, and places in the Pine Barrens where a bit of work with a shovel and a sack of quicklime can serve a similar purpose, and you don’t have to drag anything heavy very far from the trunk of your car.

The woodlands around the Carranza Memorial are particularly useful, and have something of a traditional value among the Families of the metropolitan area.

GE, Shell and BP are not “funding” AGW, they are positioning themselves through public relations to make themselves out to be environmentally conscious companies, they are also lobbying governments (especially in GE’s case) to make a profit from any future environmental regulations. This has nothing to do with “funding communism”.

You say ridiculous things like “megacorps” as if a larger corporation is evil but a small one ok.

What has been documented here? Please show me the corporations funding outright communists with the knowing intent to push communism.

D. Patterson (14:55:09) :

The statement is an absurdity, many large businesses donate to causes they believe in, none have anything to do with outright communism, some are “progressive” and socialist leaning but no large business is going to knowingly fund an economic system that would destroy themselves. Which is why the comment is absurd. The big businesses that donate to greenpeace do so out of PR, not because they are funding communists.

You guys keep repeating “big business” as if there is something wrong with a business being big.

E. Michael Smith is one of the brightest, most communicative persons I have ever interviewed. (I have been doing TV for 55 years and done thousands of interviews)
I wish I could put him on Tv for a hour so he could really help us undestand the real interworkings of Gistemp and the NASA/GISS and NOAA/NCDC inner-related layers of programs. He has spent a thousand hours or more finding his way through the layers and getting into the detailed systems. I want to know more.

Meanwhile, I apologize for the honorary Ph.D. for Lord Monckton. It was an error by the Producer that I failed to notice before the program aired. It was not the only error.

I accept the critical remarks of the writers on this website. I am simply an old school, TV Meteorologist, 75 years old with failing eye sight that makes reading the prompter tough. I wrote the entire script and accept blame for contemp errors.

On the other hand the program was a huge success as measured by the rules of my world. The 4.6 rating beat 30 Rock and was the highest rating of the ENTIRE WEEEK for KUSI. Our website has had over a million hits by people viewing the video. Numerous stations in other markets have asked re-transmission rights which is being granted.

After all these years my skin is hypo thick. Let me have it. I appreciate the points of complaint and will use them to guide me next time and am not offended by the cuts.

[Reply: Many thanks for all your hard work on creating the program John. Congratulations on its success from all at wattsupwiththat]

Thank you John for putting the documentary together, it does a good job explaing the subject for the layman. I agree with you on E. Michael Smith, he was very informative and was able to explain the material clear and concise.

John, some of the best parts included interviews on the street. In the future consider doing more of these and then have experts respond to them (or take Lord Monckton along with you). The myths on the street are the ones that need the most attention. We can talk for days about all of the details and people will still believe that recycling and using less energy will solve “global warming”.

A great segment would be asking people if they are reducing their carbon footprint by using less electricity in an area that uses nuclear power, such as the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in your area.

John Coleman (23:03:08) : E. Michael Smith is one of the brightest, most communicative persons I have ever interviewed.

BLUSH! I just do what I can to share what I know. But thank you for the kind words.
I wish I could put him on Tv for a hour so he could really help us understand

Any time you have a use for me, you know where I can be reached.

I wrote the entire script and accept blame for contemp errors.

Well, the script was very good. I’ve had a couple of folks sit up and take notice after seeing it. I was pleasantly surprised to see that you had the political and social connections in it as well (i.e. Maurice Strong et. al.)

Just a nicely balanced package of all the issues in an accessable form.

And while we, here, have had a few years to ‘come up to speed’ on the technical trivia, you had the gap between two deadlines! Frankly, you caught on to a lot of the complexity faster than most folks.

I must absolve you of one error, though. I stated “no thermometers” were in some N. Canada provences when I ought to have said “no thermometers NORTH of 65 Degrees”. I ‘self edited’ too sharply during taping. So if folks call up saying “But there IS a thermometer in Yukon!” they are right, and it was my error. (It is at the southern edge of Yukon near 60 ish degrees. My web page has the detail right and the effect is still the same.)
On the other hand the program was a huge success as measured by the rules of my world. The 4.6 rating beat 30 Rock and was the highest rating of the ENTIRE WEEEK for KUSI. Our website has had over a million hits by people viewing the video. Numerous stations in other markets have asked re-transmission rights which is being granted.

WOW. In media terms, that’s a home run!

For what it’s worth, If I’d been doing the editing, I’d have likely left in the New Zealand example. It is striking. Campbell Island (again, from memory) was the most southern and coldest island location. It is deleted from the recent temperatures but left in the baseline. Take it out of the baseline, too, and the “warming” of New Zealand goes away.

I think a very effective story could be made just showcasing the places where the local temperature record shows no warming. And contrasting with those that do. (Such as the New Mexico Rockies are taken out of the recent record, while Albaquerque is left in. Which is warmer? Yet the mountains to not get warmer over time…)

At any rate, given the “news” venue with the fast cycle times, I was very impressed at how much you managed to pack into one hour, while keeping it entertaining.

And I’d love to know where one goes to get that Walter Cronkite voice… ;-)

E. Michael Smith is one of the brightest, most communicative persons I have ever interviewed. (I have been doing TV for 55 years and done thousands of interviews)

I wish I could put him on TV for a hour so he could really help us understand the real interworkings of Gistemp and the NASA/GISS and NOAA/NCDC inner-related layers of programs. He has spent a thousand hours or more finding his way through the layers and getting into the detailed systems. I want to know more.

E.M.Smith:
I think a very effective story could be made just showcasing the places where the local temperature record shows no warming. And contrasting with those that do.

There are scores of aspects to this controversy. Why not tape episodes on a few of them, like the two above, even in advance of any commitment by the TV station to show them? Costs would be low if no fancy production values were included — i.e., if it were just a pair of talking heads, without any little quizzes at the end of each segment. Even if not broadcast, these episodes could serve as teasers or pilots or demos to tempt network executives to create a fuller production.

Forgive me if this has been talked about already and I’ve missed it but how are the computer models at NASA, NOAA, CRU et. al. handling the urban heat island effects? Has the algorithm or methodology been posted somewhere? A reasonable person would expect some kind of systematic reduction in the recorded temperatures to offset the artificially induced “warming” in the raw recorded temperature data.

ExxonMobil, Shell and BPOil continue to this day to officially state on their official web sites that they agree with the science of the IPCC. ExxonMobil’s two lead scientists, Brian Flannery and Haroon Kheshgi, shared in the 2007 joint Nobel Peace Prize for their contributions to the IPCC science. Visit these corporate web sites and read it for yourself. You report, you decide.

This was taken from James Hansen’s website…”As a college student in Iowa, I was attracted to science and research by James Van Allen’s space science program in the physics and astronomy department. Since then, it only took me a decade or so to realize that the most exciting planetary research involves trying to understand the climate change on earth that will result from anthropogenic changes of the atmospheric composition.

“One of my research interests is radiative transfer in planetary atmospheres, especially interpreting remote sounding of the earth’s atmosphere and surface from satellites. Such data, appropriately analyzed, may provide one of our most effective ways to monitor and study global change on the earth. The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.”

“changes that will result”, “influence the nature of the measurements obtained” Sounds like NASA’s Goddard Institute fellow James Hansen has his mind made up and is twisting data to match his BOGUS hypothesis…